Archived Blog
November…
Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted. Apologies for that, it seemed over the last few weeks every time that I went to post something new, there was some reason why I couldn’t. Anyway, all is well now for me to post so I’ll try my best to remember the most of everything that has happened over the past couple of weeks.
A couple of weekends ago, the Grade 11 students went to Sodore for their retreat. This retreat was the same as that which happened last year that I attended (described here), except obviously with different students. I was glad to be able to attend this year; I know most of the Grade 11 students well this year, having taught most of them in IT last year.
We had a great weekend, spending time swimming in the pool there and fighting with the monkeys. Our topic was again sexual purity and the kids joined in the discussions well and had some interesting points to raise. We (well the boys anyway) studied a book called “Every Young Man’s Battle”, a book about the battle for sexual purity that they all have to fight as Christians. The book is written from a very different perspective than I am used to, and the kids too, and is very critical and generalising of young Christian men. The guys were quite disgusted with it, and made sure that they let the girls of the group know that they were most certainly different from the young men portrayed in the book. Pictures of the event follow:
One of the students was feeding one of the monkeys with a bag of peanuts when another came seemingly out of nowhere, ran up, snatched the whole bag and scarpered into the nearest tree. Bandits!
On Sunday last, I participated in the annual Great Ethiopian Run, a 10km run through the streets of Addis. This event is attended my about 40,000 other runners, and so the streets are very crowded; its more like a 10km walk behind thousands of other people who really can’t be bothered running it at all. However, the atmosphere is great, and it was quite good fun. Its amazing how out of a crowd that big you still seem to bump into so many people that you know. Some pictures:
Ready for the race, with our house guards; one had stayed behind fortunately.
My piece of great news for the month of November is that Bingham has finally been given access to broadband faster internet. Honestly, after hopes being raised and then dashed seemingly endless times before, I never thought I would see the day. However, after our Maintenance manager went to ETC to practically wring their necks, they came round, installed the equipment in a couple of hours, and then left again. One could ask why this simple process took literally years to happen, but this would be a completely pointless question. Anyway, now we have access to faster internet, and pleasingly, it is noticeably faster. Its not broadband like we have at home, technically only 5 times faster than dial-up, and I’m glad that I’m not fitting the bill for it at $700US a month. However, we can now access emails reliably, and I can once again get onto Google talk, which has not worked on dial-up since the start of this year for whatever other equally pointless reason.
I’m still wrestling with many ways to try and get my motorcycle fixed. Unfortunately, the part that has broken does not seem to be available in Ethiopia, and getting it from another country is proving tricky. I’m finding the Taxis here more and more frustrating so hopefully soon I can get something sorted out. Brian’s father is coming out over Christmas and they are hoping to take a trip together some I’m hoping that I’ll be able to join them, otherwise Christmas might be a tad boring for me!
Today, Brian and Aaron and I went to Mesekel square in the centre of the city to see a road rally that had been organised. It was typically Ethiopian. The cars themselves made lots of noise, and we kept looking for speeding race-cars to go with the noise. Mostly, though, they were very slow, crawling along. At some points, it was more exciting to close your eyes. The crash barriers consisted mainly of plastic caution tape. A couple of large sacks had been positioned in the more dangerous corners, but instead of being filled with sand, they were filled with torn up pieces of rubbish. Even fewer tyres were placed in various places. On one corner, a hair-pin bend, there were very little protective barriers coming out of the turn, adjacent to the pavement where many people were walking down the street. On one occasion, one of the cars took the corner far too wide and skidded badly; through the crash barrier plastic tape. A guy in a wheelchair narrowly missed ending up even worse off but amazingly escaped. It was comical, knowing that no-one got hurt.
In other news, our cat is very much pregnant. We expect her to have kittens any time now; she is extremely big as the picture shows. Brian has some people lined up to take some of them, but he is hoping that she has a few rather than 6 or 7.
That is most of what I can remember of this month. I’ll try not to let another month slip by before I blog again, its not fun trying to remember all that in one go.
Niall
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