Week 1
Adwa Ethiopia.
Never sure what we are letting ourselves in for, once again its completely different to any were else we have been.
We are on the top of the Simian mountains at over ten thousand feet, the school is built on the side of the mountain, it’s like climbing Rivington pike three times a day, in temperatures between 104 and 110 degrees no wonder the Ethiopians are good runners but for me at this height, just a flight of steps and I am panting for breath.
We were going to acclimatise our selves slowly by driving over land but it became too dangerous to do so, just as we were about to leave Addis Abba the Muslims decided to burn 59 churches down and kill some Christians nothing to do with them here, but a pastor in America allegedly burned a Koran, so they took it out on the local Christians, so we decided it would be safer to fly up to Adwa
Not sure if we have gone out of the frying pan in to the fire, the headlines in the local newspaper from the Ethiopian president is that if dictator in Eritrea does not stop attacking Ethiopia he will attack them, as we are very close to the border. We will see what happens.
The good news is that this Don Bosco school is a hospital, as well as a technical school, with a large Red Cross on the roof!, every three months Italian voluntary doctors and surgeons come here to perform surgery on local patients. This week they have been doing cataract surgery and straightening peoples deformed hands. Next to my bed room is the dentist surgery he always has a long queue outside my door from seven in the morning, till six at night not sure if he does any cosmetic work as yesterday he extracted over seventy teeth.
Tomorrow I start my first class teaching Word and Excel to seven Ethiopian Sisters three Southern Sudanese Sisters, and one Korean sister, they are going to set up a School near Juba in Southern Sudan. I will let you know how we go on teaching to students who speak Aramaic and Tigrean, all our student have to learn three languages Tigrean which is the local language and Aramaic the national language, also English.
Every letter in the Tigrean and Aramaic alphabet has seven sounds, the capital and lower case have different sounds, and only a very few of the letters can you use a capital.
I have been given three sectaries for one hour our each day, to try and translate all the records from Aramaic and Tigrean into English plus gather all their phone numbers and address qualifications etc.
The two sisters in charge are quite new one from America and one from Columbia, having over one thousand students and 140 staff and running three commercial organisations its rather difficult to control without a proper data base, this is the first time anyone has attempted to do it. But I have always enjoyed challenges.
But this is something very different.
Till next time.
Leo
Week 2
Adwa Ethiopia
This Don Bosco School is like no other we have worked in.
This site is massive, probably over a hundred football fields in size.
The range of subjects and trades are unbelievable, they have production facilities for garment making, embroidery and knitting ,these help to support the school financially and give jobs to the local people.
There are two large greenhouses in which we grow all our own food, potatoes, tomatoes, salads etc.
The farm has cows, goats, chickens and rabbits. All the surplus food and milk is donated to poor local villagers.
There is a program to support over sixty orphaned children who live with local families, we feed them during the day and help them financially.
Not sure how many students we have, as I have not yet completed one of the four data bases I have to write, I know there will be over a thousand with a further thousand children we support in various ways.
In all, we have 140 employees on our wages bill covering farming, clothing and knitwear production, teaching staff ,maintenance drivers, concrete block making for the new hospital etc,
Everything for the school infirmary and clinic has to come through the port of Djubti, a round trip of eight or nine days. The school has two large trucks that carry containers; these are being used to bring all the equipment for the new hospital from Italy. The staffing of the new hospital will be done on a rota base by volunteer doctors from Italy.
I hope nobody gets ill for the next ten weeks, that’s how long before the next doctor will becoming, otherwise its a 500 mile trip to Addis .
Till next time
Leo
Week 3 Adwa Ethiopia.
One thing about writing data bases is you get to know quite a lot about local customs.
The first thing is their names, they use a first name like we do but the second name is their Dads first name, the third name is their granddads first name,
All names are related to an event like new grass, morning, evening, night the sun; one girl this morning was called daughter of beggar etc,
All the written records are in Tigrean, my job is to translate everything from Tigrean into English, from hundreds of loose paper files, onto a data base on the computers, plus a wage data base for 140 staff.
Most of the sisters are Italian or Columbian only one is Ethiopian, none of them are able to read Tigrean, so you can understand the need for a data base that is written in English. The government are often asking for information on the students and at the moment it is difficult to give it.
The teachers have a very hard time, 65 in a class, they work from 8 till 6 and have to clean their own classrooms, the discipline in the classes is excellent, all the students are desperate for a good education and many of them walk four to five miles to get here, what parent in England would let a 6 or 7 year old walk this distance to school on their own, not even on a road just mountain tracks.
All the playing surfaces are concrete or tiled, the reason is, that they are used as catchment areas to collect the rain water which is channelled into underground reservoirs then pumped up into 5000 gallon tanks on stilts. These tanks create storage and good water pressure to give us plenty of water all round the school., so even in a drought we are not short of water.
This is just a taste of what I have to translate from. With the help of four sectaries
የኢትዮጵያ ፌዴራላዊ ዲሞክራሲያዊ ሪፐብሊክ Tigrean
ye-Ītyōṗṗyā Fēdēralāwī Dīmōkrāsīyāwī Rīpeblīk Amaric
Translated to mean (Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia)
Each student can read and write this in both languages plus English.
Cheerio for now
Angela & Leo
Week 4
Adwa Ethiopia 115 degrees
As I gradually get to know this place it amazes me what goes on, I’ve never met a Don Bosco site with such a range of activities, as I stated previously our site is probably over 50 football fields in size but on the other side of the wall a Don Bosco boys division exists, similar in size, they take our older boys and train them in engineering, welding, and machining etc,
Close by is Mother Teresa home run by just three Nuns looking after 50 mentally ill men, a similar number of young and old ladies.
One nun looks after the 50 males, one looks after about 50 females, and one looks after 61 babies..
The reason most of them are here are a result of the trauma they suffered in the war losing spouses many killed in front of them. This still goes on in Eritrea they just dump the unwanted sick over the border and they end up with the Mother Teresa Sisters.
The babies are abandoned, many with deformities, HIV, mothers dying at birth, leaving just the dad who cannot cope, so he just disappears.
How they finance these centres I will never know, the state gives them no help the sisters rely on voluntary contributions which miraculously, comes in from the most obscure places and many times they are on the brink of having no food to feed these unfortunate people.
This Northern area has been badly neglected by the central government since the end of the war; it is only now that Don Bosco is here that any decent education system is beginning but, there is a chronic shortage of qualified teachers most of the teachers here, except for the science staff, have been trained by the sisters.
Angela asked me to take 8 of her teachers at the end of each day and train them in computers, yes, some of the teachers have never used a computerT
They are desperate for volunteers to come out and teach English and computers, so any of you who feel like two months holiday in the sun let me know.
Cherrio for now.
Leo
The Sister are very badly stretched in their ability to cope with running this place
Of the eight sisters,
- 1
- 2 One of the Italian Sisters is in charge of the kindergarten 350 children
- 3 The Vietnamese/American Sister is in charge of 650 older students
- 4 An Italian Sister is in charge of the kitchen ,very important job that is!!!.
- 5 The Kitchen Sister is also a nurse so she is in charge of the clinic, with an Italian nurse. The clinic is really a doctor’s surgery as we don’t have any resident doctor, she has to do everything a doctor is trained to do.
. Every two or three months the theatres and dentist surgery have to be got ready for the volunteer doctors from Italy so, that everything runs smoothly when they arrive. Everybody has to be able to double up when required. Fancy a job as a trainee dentist assistant?
Sister Marella the computer teacher is also the Social Administrater.
Every month she sees over one thousand poor families who are supported by sponsors in Italy, these in turn support over 2000 children.
She sits in a building near the gate and sees about 200 parents per day over a 7 days period distributing money and goods that have been donated by families in Italy6
The Kitchen Sister is also a nurse so she is in charge of the clinic, with an Italian nurse. The clinic is really a doctor’s surgery as we don’t have any resident doctor, she has to do everything a doctor is trained to do.
. Every two or three months the theatres and dentist surgery have to be got ready for the volunteer doctors from Italy so, that everything runs smoothly when they arrive. Everybody has to be able to double up when required. Fancy a job as a trainee dentist assistant?
Sister Marella the computer teacher is also the Social Administrater.
Every month she sees over one thousand poor families who are supported by sponsors in Italy, these in turn support over 2000 children.
She sits in a building near the gate and sees about 200 parents per day over a 7 days period distributing money and goods that have been donated by families in Italy
NO 6 Sister Ruth, a Columbian sister, is the Mother Superior.( The Boss lady).
Her job is like running a small town, containers arrive most weeks filled with goods for here or the new hospital. Everything has to come from Spain or Italy through the port of Djibouti, nothing available here.
The biggest problem is with the customs, she spends hours arguing about the customs duty she has to pay, sometimes they ask for as much as twenty thousand dollars, on occasion she has to go to the port, a distance of 500 miles to get a container released from Djibouti then, through a further border post into Ethiopia.
The local authority can be just as bad always wanting a bribe, when we won’t give it to them they make things difficult for us.
Cheerio
Angela & Leo
Week 5 & 6
Adwa Ethiopia
Temp 120 degrees
The Kitchen Sister is also a nurse so she is in charge of the clinic, with an Italian nurse. The clinic is really a doctor’s surgery as we don’t have any resident doctor, she has to do everything a doctor is trained to do.
. Every two or three months the theatres and dentist surgery have to be got ready for the volunteer doctors from Italy so, that everything runs smoothly when they arrive. Everybody has to be able to double up when required. Fancy a job as a trainee dentist assistant?
Sister Marella the computer teacher is also the Social Administrater.
Every month she sees over one thousand poor families who are supported by sponsors in Italy, these in turn support over 2000 children.
She sits in a building near the gate and sees about 200 parents per day over a 7 days period distributing money and goods that have been donated by families in Italy
Sister Ruth, a Columbian sister, is the Mother Superior.( The Boss lady).
Her job is like running a small town, containers arrive most weeks filled with goods for here or the new hospital. Everything has to come from Spain or Italy through the port of Djibouti, nothing available here.
The biggest problem is with the customs, she spends hours arguing about the customs duty she has to pay, sometimes they ask for as much as twenty thousand dollars, on occasion she has to go to the port, a distance of 500 miles to get a container released from Djibouti then, through a further border post into Ethiopia.
The local authority can be just as bad always wanting a bribe, when we won’t give it to them they make things difficult for us.
Yes, life here has its problems, at the end of our stay we can just walk away but, missionary life has to go on..
Lots of patience is required, many prayers and Gods help..
Cheerio
Angela & Leo
Week 8
Adwa Ethiopia temp 100degrees
Yes the temperature is dropping we are now coming into the rainy season, yesterday we had heavy rain during the day. Every evening I look forward to having a drink outside where it is a bit cooler but, when the first rains come the termites come out of the ground, they have three inch wing span and make straight for the nearest light which is where I usually sit, thousands of them fly around for about half an hour then drop to the floor, or on top of you, depending where you sit.
On hitting the floor they drag themselves around till they lose their wings, then they try to find a Queen to form a new colony. A one inch grub with four legs is all that remains, the local people sweep them up into paper bags, then fry them to sell.
I will watch carefully what they try to feed me with for the next few days, they taste very much like locusts, if you have ever had the chance to eat them.
Today is the feast of Mary Help of Christians we celebrated it in the church of Don Bosco, which also serves as the parish church.When it was built it was large enough to seat 350 people.
Angela and I normally go to the Saturday evening mass at six o’clock but, because it was a special occasion we thought we would attend the 6.30 morning mass.
What a surprise we had, the church was full with about four hundred people inside and many more outside,
There were 12 Catholic Priests celebrating Mass and about fifteen Orthodox Priests attending, many Deacons in very colourful attire, the choir consisted of forty singers all dressed in blue robes.
One side of the church was full of ladies dressed in white with white head scarves, the other side was all the men dressed in traditional attire the young ones though, are now dressing very much like western youngsters .The service lasts for about three hours and the mass is in Tigrean, a local language.
All the singing, which goes on throughout the Mass is in Ge’ez which is a three thousand year old language; everyone seems to know it even the young ones because they all sing it with great energy.
The average age of all the priests here is around thirty five, in our seminary we have thirty six seminarians They all support Manchester United and much to Angela’s delight they even have special channel for all English football.
I will send some photos of the service later
Leo