Aske - November 9, 2008

The story about an Eskimo who paid the Bornholmish a visit in Africa

Hello again everybody, time for some updates from the land far away.

Yesterday (Saturday) we received some very good news from Norway; a delegation from RCNUWC is going to Western Ethiopia in the Christmas break and passing by our town, Jimma, on their way there.
We are (hopefully) going to see nothing less than five familiar faces here. We both got very happy when we read this in an e-mail yesterday. I think I got a bit overexcited, probably because my previous personal first-year Jens Møller from Greenland will come too. Unfortunately they will only stay in Jimma for one night (which can quickly result in almost nothing if the planes or busses are delayed), but it will still be fun and strange to see the people here. My own beloved English teacher (guess I had to write that in case she reads the blog) Donna and Maria’s English teacher, Pete, will come too as well as Ezequiel and a first-year from Iceland. According to Maria (the North Atlantic expert amongst us) claims that Ingunn is a girl’s name, so we expect to meet an Icelandic girl here soon. I have already promised Maria that I will give Ingunn some moral support and some financial aid when she gets here.
Well, enough about a maybe-visit we might get for some hours in 1½ months.

How are we? Nothing big has happened since last update. Our dream about an electric stove came to life last Monday. It is much easier to sit inside cooking. We are getting lazy yes. We are also considering investing in one of these Italian silver espresso-things you put on a stove, but it costs the same as 16 kilos of avocadoes so we have to consider if it’s worth the expense.

We have also bought some small boxes/baskets made out of straws. They are highly decorating and we feel very African when we have them in our house. Yesterday we of course washed our clothes (as we do every Saturday morning), but also cleaned our rooms and moved some tables around so that we now have free space and a very neat apartment I would say. Let’s see if we can keep it that way for at least two days.

Last week we had more diaries to correct than ever before. Luckily we have got a bit faster now, so we managed to finish correcting them 20 minutes before we gave them back. In all four classes the average mark has gone up (an increase of between 0,2 and 1,1 out of 25 points) which means that many of the students have gone from a C to a B. Just to state it again: The marking record of the school shows that 37% of the students get A+, 38% get A, 22% get B and 3% get C... Nobody (except for 2% of our English diaries) gets D.

We wanted to go to Addis once in November to relax and do some food-shopping and once in December to do the Christmas-shopping and maybe send a parcel or two to Europe. However it seems like the two trips will be combined in to one. We wanted to have gone to Addis this weekend, but we never asked the school for two days of. So we looked out for new plans. Two of the Danes from the nearby enclave asked us if we wanted to go to a lake in the wilderness some 17 km. from here. We were supposed to go this morning, but when they called the taxi-driver he said that the road would be inaccessible for the next three to four months (because of the mud-condition of the road). So they said they would try again next week and see if it wasn’t just the Ethiopians being over-cautious again.

On November 30 it will be the first Sunday in Advent so we also need to find some kind of pine-thing we can put four candles in. Maybe we will have to find that in Addis.

We finally received our weekly Danish newspaper here on Thursday.”News”-paper is maybe overrating it a bit as it took 15 days for it to get here, but it is really nice to have some intellectual things to read every week. It surely also prevents Maria from panicking because of our lack of things to read.

Last weekend we also exchanged videos with the Danish family here – so now we have 250 GB full of different films. This morning we watched Aristocats as 60 GB of the films we got were children’s movies meant for their two-year old son. We have also started on a documentary in three parts about the origin of coffee (a couple of miles from here – ha!).

Last news from me: we have almost got our own cat now. For the last couple of weeks we have befriended a cat that now comes to our door many times every day. It has surely never been cuddled before, but it seems to like it. We give it the leftover tuna from our sandwiches and milk every day. The people living in the house here stare strangely at us when we spend time with the cat, as pets here are not for petting purposes.

I guess that’s all I can think about writing this week.

Congratulations to you all about Obama’s victory=)

Take care everyone, and a happy November to you all.

Aske