Aske - November 1st

As you might have noticed there seems to be a tendency that we are only online in the weekends – now it just happened again.
Today is the first of November and I really cannot understand it. Outside the weather here is as it always is – sunny and comfortably hot. Today is the first of November (sorry, I just have to repeat for my own sake). Under normal circumstances I would have started making Christmas decorations two weeks ago, but here the winter seems far, far away. Most probably it will never make it all the way to Jimma.
On my desktop I have a background picture from RCN in Norway - it was taken in the summer-sunshine and the fjord looks nice and warm. Now I just wonder how the weather is there at this moment, I am afraid it is slightly darker than on the picture I have of it.
Yea the missing-Christmas-spirit-depression will surely come to me in a month – I can already feel it =)

What about the news from here? Well, we are doing fine. We are quite accustomed to the way of life now. Yesterday we bought a basket to store fruits in and in general we get more and more well-equipped. We are intending on buying an electric heating plate (stove) this week - not because our camping-gas-thing doesn’t work, but just because we want to feel privileged being able to cook spaghetti and fry onions at the same time. We know it is extravagant, but I do believe it is important to feel good here if only for a few months.
Like every Saturday morning we have washed our clothes today. This week it was my turn, so I have been in the shade of a tree scrubbing for 2½ hours. My arms are a bit sore now and yes, I do feel pity for myself.

This last week we have brought the laptop to some of the classes, because I am sure pictures and other visualizations stimulate the learning process. Of course the teachers have never used any remedies in the classes (not to accuse them, but because there are no), so the students are understandably excited when we pull out the laptop of the bag. So far we have only shown them a PowerPoint-presentation with pictures from our school in Norway. When they saw the first pictures of campus you could hear a gasp in the classroom because of the beauty and every time a black person was shown there were comments and questions about who it was. Pictures of tall Danish Lauge and short Sesotho Kopano were also popular, but especially a picture from graduation with white, Finnish Backmann and Kenyan Jonathan holding hands made the Ethiopian students talk. Luckily I had one picture of Yilikal from Ethiopia which made the students applaud when they saw it.
Haha, it was fun for the students to hear about the school and seeing pictures of Africans on skis, but it was just as fun for Maria and I to hear what they had to say about it all.

All this computer-thing actually started because we wanted to show them a movie. We have about forty movies on a hard disk here, but after a thorough consideration we believe that the best one to show would actually be Simpsons the Movie. We know, we know that it is not the most educational and pedagogically correct movie, but the English language in it is actually at a good level and with a good pace and pronunciation. Now we just need to download the subtitles from an internet café.
We also asked the school to buy an extension wire for the speakers because there is no electricity in the 8B and 8C classrooms. They said they would have bought it for last Thursday – I still haven’t seen it though.
Yep, that was an update about what we do in class: we try to use modern technology in our teaching.

Now to something different, but yet very important; the number of whites in Jimma. I am sorry, but even the Ethiopians say “black” and “white” about people, so we just have to adapt. Anyways, the issue is that these last three days the number of whites we have seen in the streets has exploded. We think it is maybe because the rainy season is supposed to be over by now and so the number of foreigners coming to Ethiopia increases. On one hand it is nice because we hope it can take some of the attention away from us when we walk on the streets if it is not a sensation in itself to see a white person. On the other hand I feel confused now. We have completely lost count of the other foreigners in town. Before we said hey and talked to, I think, every single white person we saw – now we are just two out of many.

Did we not write about the Danish enclave we have found? It is actually not new news - we saw them for the first time in late September. They are in total 8 Danes (one is only two years old though) living in three different houses, all within 200 metres from our. They are here working on two different projects organised by the vet-university in Copenhagen and Jimma University. Some are here writing for their masters degree and some for their PhDs, some will just stay here for a couple of months and some will stay for more than a year. The projects were supposed to start in August, but because of different (partially bureaucratic) complications they won’t be launched before some time in 2009. Anyways, I keep being amazed by the chances of meeting eight Danes in Western Ethiopia living very close to us. One month ago you could almost count the foreigners in Jimma on two hands, and we have not seen any Germans, Finns, Swedes or Norwegians, so it is actually quite a coincident that there were many Danes. We have had some nice times with them so far; we got invited for home-made burgers last week in the house of the four youngest ones, and as recently as last night we got invited for a gin & tonic at the couple with the two year old after having had dinner with them at a restaurant in town. As Maria wrote; knowing the other Danes also gives us some advantages, such as freshly canned sausages from Addis – very nice. We also talk a lot about where one can find what here in town, something which is very useful. We have found butter, milk, knives and even curry thanks to the other Danes. Today we are going to exchange movies from our hard disks so we will get something new to watch. Maria also borrowed two books a few days ago (but she has already read them now).
We (I think it was mostly me) thought a lot about if they were going to stay here for Christmas, because that would increase the chances of roasted duck and rice pudding, but it seems like they are all going back for the holidays. Well, then Maria and I will have to get some good Christmas spirit going on our own. My parents have sent a package with cinnamon, so that we can make some kind of Christmassy food in two months time.
Yep, enough about Christmas.

We have also got an e-mail with a comment from the blog by Pete (r Wilson) saying he would pass by Jimma some time in his holidays – which we are very happy about. We are looking very much forward to see him again and to talk about experiences, culture and Norway. Weehee I am a bit impatient actually to get a visitor from far away to our town where we can show him around and stuff.

Down here we have a very limited access to information so we are quite worried about the situation the world seems to be in at the moment. The only thing we know about the global crisis is what we have received in a couple of e-mails from my father, and in the only fifteen minutes we have watched BBC down here they kept repeating “Iceland has gone bankrupt”. So yes, we actually do worry about it a lot. Especially Maria, for obvious reasons, is afraid that the ugly Crisis-Monster will creep all the way to the Faroese and strike as hard as it did there 15 years ago. But as mentioned, we don’t know much about it. One month ago my parents subscribed an international weekly Danish newspaper for us, but we still haven’t received it, so we are not able to follow yet.

Talking about receiving mail; a few days ago we got a package from Maria’s mother – all the way from the North Atlantic, it was the same kind of excitement as opening the presents lying under the Christmas-tree. On the stamp it said “Tórshavn 20. Okt 2008” and we got it here on the 29th of October. Quite fast I would say – nine days. The other Danes say that it takes about three days to get a letter from Denmark to Addis Ababa and about five days to get it from Addis to here. Hehe, we are living out in the province.

Anyways, we have to upload this and get on the web now.

So long!

Great wishes to all of you reading this

Aske