Our Situation

Well our regional director has now been, won (almost) all of us over with her direct, open, professional, knowledgeable and cheerful approach and gone back to the UK. From information obtained in meetings the latest best guess is that we will be able to complete our placements as planned and so we'll be here until the end of this year / early next. Good news, particularly for me, since we're coming up to the busy season for the ICT unit (summer teacher / school director training) and we can now go ahead with preparations. It looks, however, as if VSO's contribution as a whole will be diminished whatever the future holds as scaling back seems to be necessary - for me this is the real shame because living amongst, and working with the people has always been VSO's strength.


Across Cultures
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This was the posting I was going to make while we were waiting for potentially more momentous news but we got caught up with meetings last week: I thought I'd catalogue a few random cultural differences that we've seen or heard reported.

We mentioned before that this is a hand-shaking and hand-holding culture, this goes right down to very young children who will offer a small hand as part of a greeting in the street and sometimes a very shy 'hi' or a response to "men shimka / shimki" - the Tigrinya for "what is your name". Amongst adults handshaking just goes on all the time (between males, females and amongst the sexes) and there's even usually an offer of a wrist if the person you're greeting happens to have been working and hasn't yet washed their hands. I still haven't got used to having my hand held throughout a conversation ...

In order to attract somebody's attention say, a waitress's, you can just shout out "haftei!" (my sister) or, more politely, "men shimki!" (what's your name?) - I can just imagine the reaction to "oi what's your name!" in the UK but it really is the polite way to do it here.

Finally we heard a (possibly apocryphal) story about local embassy staff who were once given food left over from an embassy "do" - blue cheese and smoked salmon - both are items we would kill for particularly if we hadn't had them for a while. However, not knowing what to do with smelly, mouldy, cheese and raw fish (eating them certainly wasn't an option) it was decided that the best course of action was to bury it all in a corner of the embassy garden.

P