Kerosene is back and seems to be in plentiful supply. Panic over for now.
Unfortunately, without a television, the Olympics have passed us by. It does sound, from the BBC, as if we’ve missed a good one. Next time …
We’re going on holiday. We’ll be back online in three weeks.
Thursday, 21 August 2008
Saturday, 16 August 2008
I was supposed to go to Keren for another week of workshops. This time, to 400 teachers in groups of 40 over six days (with no resources available, a book familiarisation workshop with no books, but that’s par for the course). The trouble was, we weren’t to get the back until next Saturday afternoon and buses from Keren to Asmara are notoriously unreliable at the moment. Usually this wouldn’t matter, it’s normal to wait 2 or three hours for a bus and if after all that you don’t get on one, you come back the next day. However , in this case we’ve got to be at the airport very early on the Sunday morning, we’ve got a three-week holiday in South Africa. I really wasn’t prepared to take the chance of not being able to get on a bus on Saturday and so said I could do the workshop until Friday. For some reason this wasn’t acceptable, and so now I’m not going to Keren at all. I feel really bad about it, as if I’m letting my colleagues down . Not sure what else I could have done. The atmosphere at work was very frosty for the rest of the day. I bought cakes for everyone yesterday and they’ve started talking to me again but still feel bad.
Having a games evening at Anne’s house tonight. My first game of Scrabble for months, I’m very excited.
Got chatting to a family last night, the mother and children had come for a holiday to visit her brother who lives here and has just been demobbed from the army. We asked where she lived and she replied Cambridge. Yet another surreal moment, talking about Cherry Hinton Road, just round the corner from where we lived.
C
Having a games evening at Anne’s house tonight. My first game of Scrabble for months, I’m very excited.
Got chatting to a family last night, the mother and children had come for a holiday to visit her brother who lives here and has just been demobbed from the army. We asked where she lived and she replied Cambridge. Yet another surreal moment, talking about Cherry Hinton Road, just round the corner from where we lived.
C
Monday, 11 August 2008
A teacher's life here is not an easy one.
The last six days have been spent helping my colleagues in the curriculum department run a workshop for teachers from all over Eritrea. Ostensibly the workshop was to introduce teachers to the new Grades 4 (for students aged 10) and 7 (students aged 13) textbook and teacher’s guide.
This was planned to be done through training them in the teaching methodologies with the new books as the classroom resources. It was complicated by the Grade 7 books not being ready at the printers (not entirely their fault, they had been very late in being submitted) so we had to print out a copy of the books and get photocopies. As the cost of photocopying is high we were restricted to 5 copies. There were 25 teachers in the class so large groups were the order of the day.
As I said, these 25 teachers came from all over Eritrea, chosen from the five different areas (zobas). They were expected to go back to their respective zobas and cascade their knowledge down to chosen teachers from schools who in turn would give workshops within the schools. It all sounds great in theory and cascading is a sound recognised way of disseminating knowledge .However there is one big stumbling block – those five photocopied copies of the textbook and teacher’s guides will be the only versions of the book available for the next few months. This means that these teachers will be working to introduce others to a book of which there is only one copy per zoba (encompassing many many schools!). There is no way the zobas will be able to afford photocopying costs. A bit of a nightmare situation.
The teachers in our workshop were, rightly, very upset and vehement in their protests but what could we do but apologise and try to find ways to enable them to give their workshops? (e.g. working from the contents page, book map and one lesson from the book – hardly ideal!). The teachers are wonderful, dedicated people but they really are batting against the odds here.
C
This was planned to be done through training them in the teaching methodologies with the new books as the classroom resources. It was complicated by the Grade 7 books not being ready at the printers (not entirely their fault, they had been very late in being submitted) so we had to print out a copy of the books and get photocopies. As the cost of photocopying is high we were restricted to 5 copies. There were 25 teachers in the class so large groups were the order of the day.
As I said, these 25 teachers came from all over Eritrea, chosen from the five different areas (zobas). They were expected to go back to their respective zobas and cascade their knowledge down to chosen teachers from schools who in turn would give workshops within the schools. It all sounds great in theory and cascading is a sound recognised way of disseminating knowledge .However there is one big stumbling block – those five photocopied copies of the textbook and teacher’s guides will be the only versions of the book available for the next few months. This means that these teachers will be working to introduce others to a book of which there is only one copy per zoba (encompassing many many schools!). There is no way the zobas will be able to afford photocopying costs. A bit of a nightmare situation.
The teachers in our workshop were, rightly, very upset and vehement in their protests but what could we do but apologise and try to find ways to enable them to give their workshops? (e.g. working from the contents page, book map and one lesson from the book – hardly ideal!). The teachers are wonderful, dedicated people but they really are batting against the odds here.
C
Fuel and Food Again
We try to be positive about life in Eritrea and, indeed, there are many positives. The ICT training which I am in the middle of (this time it's for school directors) throws up positives all the time and is much appreciated by our students. For myself, I am finding I am having to go back to school myself in order to have the information at my finger tips so that I can field the barrage of questions. For example I have spent today (Sunday) trying to become much more familiar with the Microsoft Access database in order to be able to take a group through a simple design for a school database next week - it's one thing to be able to use software but quite another to be able to TEACH how to use it.
However there are negatives, and they are related to our recurrent themes of recent weeks. The few volunteers left in the country just now have increasing concerns about what the new volunteers due in September will find. Will they be able to cook for example? Rural volunteers all use kerosene stoves and there is very little kerosene around just now, it's rationed and you have to have a ration card and be prepared to queue for a long time once you know that there has been a delivery - not ideal for someone who is new in the country to face in their first days here.
Food items seem to dwindle constantly, bani (staple brown bread rolls) are in shorter supply than anyone can remember and, in rural areas, the variety of available food is really small. It is noticeable that rural volunteers lose weight in Eritrea and the teachers and school directors who come in for ICT training from the lowlands are almost all very thin - I'm not sure if it's malnutrition just yet but it hasn't been one of the great rainy seasons and Eritrea lives on the edge in terms of food production, if the crops fail ...
P
Due to worries about the incoming volunteers, existing volunteers have been asking the local VSO staff about the shortages, particularly the lack of cooking fuel, and their effect on the programme in Eritrea and we've not really received any reassurances (although to be fair there is very little that they can say). We're seriously starting to wonder if VSO will be able to continue here if at least the fuel shortages cannot be alleviated.
P and C
However there are negatives, and they are related to our recurrent themes of recent weeks. The few volunteers left in the country just now have increasing concerns about what the new volunteers due in September will find. Will they be able to cook for example? Rural volunteers all use kerosene stoves and there is very little kerosene around just now, it's rationed and you have to have a ration card and be prepared to queue for a long time once you know that there has been a delivery - not ideal for someone who is new in the country to face in their first days here.
Food items seem to dwindle constantly, bani (staple brown bread rolls) are in shorter supply than anyone can remember and, in rural areas, the variety of available food is really small. It is noticeable that rural volunteers lose weight in Eritrea and the teachers and school directors who come in for ICT training from the lowlands are almost all very thin - I'm not sure if it's malnutrition just yet but it hasn't been one of the great rainy seasons and Eritrea lives on the edge in terms of food production, if the crops fail ...
P
Due to worries about the incoming volunteers, existing volunteers have been asking the local VSO staff about the shortages, particularly the lack of cooking fuel, and their effect on the programme in Eritrea and we've not really received any reassurances (although to be fair there is very little that they can say). We're seriously starting to wonder if VSO will be able to continue here if at least the fuel shortages cannot be alleviated.
P and C
Thursday, 31 July 2008
Massawa
Last weekend, as Caroline has already described, we headed down to the coast to the port of Massawa on the Red Sea and then to Gergusum, a beach hotel nearby to try and relax in the infernal heat.
It’s difficult to know how to describe the Old Town which occupies a small island. It looks like what I might imagine an old Arabian port to be but a lot of its buildings were rebuilt by the Italians after a devastating earthquake in 1921. Wile Asmara, with its Italian art-deco glories which are now decaying slowly for lack of investment, avoided war damage Massawa took it in the neck in 1990, during the struggle, and is now almost a ghost city.
I have previously referred to the over-use of the phrase "war-torn" when the media mentions Eritrea, well for Massawa it is appropriate though the use of photos of the city (a barefoot child alongside a devastated building is the usual one) to illustrate current articles is perhaps out of place since Massawa's wounds are old ones.
Incredibly, amongst the ruins, people live a precarious existence with structural collapse never far away. The guidebook we have refers to a couple of wooden structures, a famous balcony and the remains of the canopy from a covered walkway in the bazaar section both of which now seem to have gone. We hope temporarily but, in the case of the former, there seemed to be a lot of old wood piled up behind the building. Given that Eritrea is one of the world's poorest countries it seems that Massawa will never be rebuilt and, like Asmara, its destiny will be to rot away though from a very different starting place.
P
It’s difficult to know how to describe the Old Town which occupies a small island. It looks like what I might imagine an old Arabian port to be but a lot of its buildings were rebuilt by the Italians after a devastating earthquake in 1921. Wile Asmara, with its Italian art-deco glories which are now decaying slowly for lack of investment, avoided war damage Massawa took it in the neck in 1990, during the struggle, and is now almost a ghost city.
I have previously referred to the over-use of the phrase "war-torn" when the media mentions Eritrea, well for Massawa it is appropriate though the use of photos of the city (a barefoot child alongside a devastated building is the usual one) to illustrate current articles is perhaps out of place since Massawa's wounds are old ones.
Incredibly, amongst the ruins, people live a precarious existence with structural collapse never far away. The guidebook we have refers to a couple of wooden structures, a famous balcony and the remains of the canopy from a covered walkway in the bazaar section both of which now seem to have gone. We hope temporarily but, in the case of the former, there seemed to be a lot of old wood piled up behind the building. Given that Eritrea is one of the world's poorest countries it seems that Massawa will never be rebuilt and, like Asmara, its destiny will be to rot away though from a very different starting place.
P
Monday, 28 July 2008
A Weekend Away
Just back from a long weekend in Massawa, one of Eritrea’s 2 main ports and beach resorts. Spent a day in the war-ravaged old town, beautiful and tragic at the same time. More of this from Phil later. And a hedonistic day at the beach. Water was an incredible temperature, not just warm, it was hot. Unlike an English beach where the sea is usually an occasion for a quick swim to keep warm and then out, the Red Sea provided the backdrop for social gatherings, Everywhere you looked around you in the water, people were meeting up, shaking hands, and conversing. The hum of conversation was everywhere. The beach was pretty empty, much too hot to stay there (apart from for the camels, which replaced donkeys as the seaside ride of choice) and we spent our day eating drinking, frolicking in the waves and reading.
Talked to lots of Eritrean families from overseas, we were surrounded by American, Swedish and North London accents which we still haven’t got used to and made several new friends. Up early yesterday (Sunday) and were on the 6.20 bus back to Asmara and rain.
C
Talked to lots of Eritrean families from overseas, we were surrounded by American, Swedish and North London accents which we still haven’t got used to and made several new friends. Up early yesterday (Sunday) and were on the 6.20 bus back to Asmara and rain.
C
Monday, 21 July 2008
Feeling better
Feeling a lot better today. The black bird has moved away. All part of the the culture adjustment process I'm sure. Thank you for your support.
C
C
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