It is a good thing I like being busy, because this week has been crazy. Right now I am trying to remember where it all went and not having much luck. Saturday was pretty good, which is suprising because it is market day and it is usually my least favorite day of the week. People come in from all the rural areas and the harassment goes through the roof. I went to the market to get some vegetables and supplies. I couldn't find the supplies and ended up picking up a local guy who insisted on carrying my stuff. We walked to one of my coffee places and just sat and talked to all the people we knew for a while. I managed to out wait him thankfully, he isn't all there because of a head injury, and hung out with friends from the office for a while. Then I went home and made tacos all from scratch, the tortillas and everything. I guess it all started getting crazy on Sunday. I went out to get some coffee, I was sitting at one of my favorite places talking to Astar, the owner of the "shop". As I am sitting there a couple of donkeys walk past with grain sacks of straw on their backs. I had been needing straw so I could mix with mud and seal my beehives. After that my counterpart rides up on his bike and asks me what I am up to, we agree to meet up in a few minutes to try and find where they took the straw. We find the straw a little up the road and negotiate a price. I have to have a grain sack to trade them so I run home to get one. When I get back my counterpart has been talking to the guys and discovered that they had bees that they would sell me. We negotiate a price and arrange for me to see the hives the next day. So Monday comes, I have a meeting with the preperatory school administrator, then I ride my bike out to the farmer training center outside of town to water the seeds I planted to feed the bees, then I come back to observe a vaccine clinic the health clinic arranged, afterwards one of the guys there took me to lunch, then to coffee. Finally I went to see the bees. We get to the arranged meeting place and find that the guy isn't there. We manage to find his house, but his wife tells us that he went out to get soap to wash his cloths, we try and fail to find him so I go home. About ten minutes after I get home my counterpart shows up with the guy so we head to his house. Turns out he has five hives, and he caught a swarm the day before. (A swarm is when the bees overpopulate a hive and part of the colony leave in order to allow more room in the hive, the hive then creates a new queen and continues on) He shows us the swarm which is clinging to the straw lid from a pot. He then goes through it and pulls out a peice of grass with a string attached to it. At the end of the string is a bee that he has tied to it. He hands me the string and I manage to get the bee to land on me, it is the queen that the guy had caught and secured to make sure the bees stay where he put them. It was extreemly cool to have the queen of a colony just sitting on my hand with no protective gear at all. It is not something you could ever do with a bee colony, much less African bees, unless they are in a swarm which is naturally more docile. Anyway, I managed to negotiate the final deal and Monday we are supposed to move the bees to my apiary, then on Thursday I will transfer them. Ok, well that is enough about bees, the other volunteers say I have bees on the brain, and I will admit that is true more often than not. So anyway, Tuesday I transported all the rest of my materials out to the FTC. My counterpart (cp) and I mixed the mud and used it to seal two transitional hives, the lady who works at the FTC wanted to get our picture, but sadly I didn't think to bring my camera. That afternoon I had to go back out to the FTC to bring the hives inside and lock them up for the night. Wednesday I went out the the FTC to put the hives in the sun, water my plants, and finish the lid to a hive, I came back to town to go to the market, had lunch and immediatly had to go back out to put the hives up because I would be busy all afternoon. It was the first day of my English club at the Preperatory school. Finally after all the paperwork, going back and forth for letters, the meeting to discuss my "curiculum", making schedules, and getting the students selected I finally got to teach. It was a really interesting class. We discussed the poem "One Inch Tall", the students had a harder time understanding it than I expected, but otherwise I think it went pretty well. By the end most of the students seemed to understand the poem, the biggest problem they seemed to have was my rate of talking, I need to slow down for them to understand better. After class some students asked a few questions and I was explaining poetry to them (who would have guessed the guy who never liked poetry would be explaining it to others) and I was discussing some of the poems by Edgar Allen Poe. They were so intense just listening to me talking about it that I am going to download some more poems tomorrow so I can read them to the students. It was really interesting seeing them figure things out and I am really interested to see how the clubs turn out. Anyway today I had the second meeting of the High School English club, the students there have a lot harder time understanding so I am going to come up with other strategies for them, I ran back out to the FTC to seal the cracks in the mud, and of course water the seeds again, I came back and had a meeting with the High school to set the times for my boys and girls club, then headed to coffee again at Astars. She is so sweet, I have coffee there probably five times a week, and I have not once paid for coffee, the chocoaltes, or gum that she gives me, or the mashed potatoes from the store next door. After hanging with her, her friends, and some of my friends I try to head home. I ran into my landlords brother who invites me to coffee (even though he knows I just drank some), so he closes his shop and we go to a coffee house. A bunch of his friends join us and we sit around for about half an hour just chatting. Anyway, I am glad to get to go use the internet tomorrow.
I hope you all have a happy Halloween!
P.S. I keep hearing people are reading my blog. Just today my PC Kelley told me she was reading it (Hi). I don't know how you guys are bored enough to get through all this but if you manage to get to this part thanks for reading. :)
10/21
Things are moving along here in Gassera. I am still trying to get a horse, but it is slow going trying to find a place to keep it among all the other stuff I have going on. Yesterday was pretty busy, I started out waiting for my counterparts to come to the office (which they never did), and got caught in a rain storm. Since I was going to work on building I had tools and supplies with me and no books or anything to keep me entertained. Then I went to the Education office to get a letter for my clubs, that made the fourth time I have tried to get letters from them, not to mention the two I had to give them to get the letters in the first place. Then I finished building the hive stands at the Farmer Training Center, watched some of the livestock office guys giving cows hormone injections and preping them for artificial insemination in a couple days. After lunch I went back to the FTC and dug and planted some flower seeds for the bees I hope to have there soon. Then I wished my mom a happy Bday while I was walking back to town. Since the FTC is one and a half kilometer from town it seems to get network. I don't know why, but it seems the further from town you get the better signal there is. After I rushed home I wiped myself down to try and minimize the smell so I could go to a meeting with the school administration. I found out there that the letter I had gotten earlier that day only specified the English language club and did not have the boys and girls club even though I had been very specific about those. So the principle told me I needed to go get another letter. It was still early enough so one of the teachers went with me to the ed office to translate. We got there right as the head of the office was leaving and after about ten minutes of them arguing I understood enough that the letter was general enough to cover that and that the administrator was refusing to write another letter and that the principle was just going to have to deal. So this afternoon I have a meeting with the principle and the teachers so hopefully he will accept it and I can just get the dates scheduled and be done with it. Otherwise I have my first club starting on Thursday so I will be able to finally get into it. Then the other four clubs are supposed to be scheduled soon so after that I should have my hands very full! I am still waiting on feedback for my proposal about creating the fish pond, and I am hoping to get started with my field visits for the beekeeping next week. As always though, I am on Ethiopia's time table and I will just continue to wait.
10/19
So I think it is about time I do a shout out to all my new friends I have gotten in PC. First of all to my friend Fred, in Butajira you were with me for my first major holiday, "Fasika." The end of the Orthodox fasting season (or one of them at least), my host family was good enough to cook me vegetarian food, sadly we didn't get to enjoy it. I know I haven't heard from you in a while but I have been told that is normal after, I am sure you will visit me again before the end of service. Then there is George, we were on and off all PST. We may not have gotten along all that well, but we never seemed to really have it off too badly during training. I am glad that we were able to at least keep it civil. Now to Bob and Charrolette, you guys have been there for me ever since I have gotten to site. I know you don't like the chemicals I spray in my house, but you put up with me anyway. I know when you have children they will be all over me cause apparently even though I don't really like them the kids seem to love me just as much as the adults. Then there is Susan, I really hope you aren't reading this cause to be honest I am about ready to wage all out war against you. You seriously bug the CRAP out of me, between you are your friends I want to tear my hair out sometimes. Last but not least I can't forget Paul. I swear you can keep me entertained all day. I know you hate the smoke when the Habesha start up the cooking fires, but I swear when I see you first thing in the morning it just cracks me up. One of these days I will figure out the thing you have for squares. Anyway, I just wanted to make sure I let everyone know how huge a part of my life you have become and that I will never forget the time I get to spend with you.
Friends proper names:
Fred: my ameoba friend that made sure food was only coming up, not going down during Fasika. I hear that they can last in your system even after the initial treatment.
George: my bacterial infections, they bothered me all during PST but never got bad thankfully.
Bob and Charrolette: my fleas. I keep treating my house and bed but they keep coming back. Female fleas can lay over a thousand eggs a day.
Susan: mosquitos, only the female sucks blood and only right before they are ready to lay their eggs. If it wasn't for my bug net I am pretty sure I would have shrivelled up from blood loss by now.
Paul: this one species of fly that flys in squares over and over. I don't know why, but they seem to do it until the Ethiopians start cooking inside, then the smoke gets them to leave. I can't even guess how much time I have lost just watching them flying in squares.
10/8
I finally managed to teach a class!!! Yesterday I started my two day training on beekeeping. It started out a little stressful, it was raining in the morning and the rain pretty much shuts everything down in rural Ethiopia. I managed to get to the office just in time to meet my counterpart to get the last of the supplies and take them to the training location, except, when I got there he was missing. He finally shows up about half an hour late, then about twenty minutes after that the guy whose office was funding the meeting showed up to tell us where to go. We get the people who have shown up for the meeting over to the office where they tell us that we didn't reserve the room so we can't hold the training there. So the guys from my office argue with them and finally convince them to let us use the conference room to hold the meeting. We get everything set up and are about to start the meeting when...the power goes out. So they have to call for a generator to run my slides off of. We finally start the meeting scheduled for 8:30am at about 11, and with a whole areas worth of people having not shown up yet. I work on the slides until 12:30 when we break for lunch and I tell my counterpart multiple times that we need the wood for constructing the hives at the office when we get back. He assured me it would be there so we go for lunch. I get to the office with the supplies I need and low and behold the wood isn't there, neither is my counterpart, my translator, or the host. About twenty minutes after we were scheduled to start everyone shows up, but not the wood. So my counterpart goes off to get the wood and I am trying to stall for time, everyone is getting restless so I decide to use the wood that I had personally purchased for another project to get stuff started, of course it isn't really the right size but I made it work. Finally he shows up with the wood and I find out that the people I am training have had the training before except for one group and they others are experts and not really interested in learning it again. I convince them to build one hive so the people who have never done it can get the experience. Something that took my volunteer group about four or five hours to do during our training took the Ethiopians about an hour and a half! I was very impressed and they even built the lid which we didn't finish during the PC training. After that we just do some discussion and break about half an hour early. That meant that finishing the hive which I had scheduled for today wasn't necessary so I had a whole afternoon with nothing scheduled. So today I get to the office, again because of the morning rain have to wait for my counterpart to arrive. When he gets there I am told that he has been assigned work in another area and can not help me at the training. We get to the meeting hall and don't have the projector, the generator, and are of course late. We start at 10:00am instead of 8:30, but at least it is a bit earlier. The power come back on so they want to turn off the generator to save gas. Of course we don't have the proper extension cord to reach the outlet though so no slides until someone comes and gets everything set up. So I teach without slides for a while. Then we finally get power in time to finish the last five slides. We break for lunch and come back to finish the day which we decide to substitute the hives for some other examples. They only take about an hour and a half, most of which was just answering questions while wax boils. Then it is one to the talk about the office politics, the problems the different groups want help with like not having a fence, things being stolen, and why they aren't productive (even though the hives are in rooms at their houses and not set up), needless to say it wasn't anything in my area so I sat until they finished at 5pm. All that to say that I think it went pretty well. The people seemed pretty interested while I was talking, the questions that were on topic were pretty good, and the feedback all said good things and that they want me to come work in the field to help them get things running. In the end we had about fifty people attend, although one group showed up five minutes before we broke for lunch the second day and literally were not there for any of the lecture. Overall I was pretty happy with how it went, although for any future training I will be taking more direct responsibility for making sure rooms are reserved and supplies are were they are supposed to be. As far as the time I stressed about it the first day, but the second day I just decided that I had to deal with the fact that Ethiopians do not work by the same time constraints that I am used to and I decided not to let it bother me.
As for other things, I am still in the process of trying to reschedule the meeting to train about the banana disease, I do have people occasionally stop me on the street to ask me when I am coming so I know I have interest. The schools just started this week, although the students are showing up but the teaching doesn't start until next week (don't ask). I met with some of the school administrators this week and they are ready to work with me. I have to give them action plans for the clubs I want to start next week and the week after that they are going to start setting up the school clubs. They did give me a hard time about the class sizes though. I have the numbers set between twenty and thirty depending on the club. They said that wasn't a good number because they have thousands of students and more than that will want to attend. I tried to explain that I am not a teacher, that I am a volunteer and this isn't my primary project, on top of that I need to have a manageable size so that I can provide the assistance the club is designed to provide. They still tried to get me to do more clubs or more students and I basically told them that we would see. So far though I am planning on having five clubs, having narrowed it down a little, at three different schools, each an hour long each week. On top of that I am working on the beekeeping stuff, which I have offered to come out to each bee cooperative once a month for four kabeles, one of which is a day trip into the gorge where I have to climb down and back up a mountain. I am working on a proposal to work on fish farming in a kabele about forty five minutes bus ride from my town; and my office has asked me to work on business design training, and maybe some poultry production. Anyway, I am not overwhelmed yet, but I am trying to keep it that way. I have plans to ask PC to send me some help next year, so hopefully I will be able to get a new volunteer to pawn some stuff off too.
So basically getting that class together has been my week. I spent all day Monday getting supplies together and meeting people to organize things (see how that went). I did realize that my big report for PC was due last Sunday so I have to run into town the day after tomorrow and write it all up. When I get back I just got permission to start my own beekeeping project at the Farmer Training Center so I will be starting that the beginning of next week.
The thing to think about in this post is responsibility. In America when you are told/asked to do something you are generally expected to have it done on time. That is not necessarily true in Ethiopia. So next time you ask for your significant other to have dinner ready when you get home, or the person at the office to get a report to you by the end of the week. If they come through for you make sure to appreciate it.
P.S. I have heard that some of the acronyms and words I use are not necessarily understood so I want to take a second to do a refresher on them. I hope this helps.
PC: Peace Corps
PCV: Peace Corps Volunteer
HCN: Host country national
Habesha: The Ethiopian name for an Ethiopian (Think "American")
Forenji: Translates to foreigner
FTC: Farmer training center
Woreda: Think county
Kabele: A governmental division of a Woreda (my Woreda has twenty-one kabeles)
GAD: Gender and Development committee
Buna: Ethiopian word for coffee
Gassera: The name of both the town and the Woreda I live in
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