Ahah!

Not really Ethiopia-related, but according to Defense Tech, the Pentagon has been working on flying saucers! The one on Flight of the Navigator still looked way cooler though.

Bombs in various places

According to Xinhuanet (a Chinese news site), the Ethiopian Federal Police defused two C4-based bombs in a public bus on Friday. And then another one went off at a chicken store, of all things. At 6AM. Apparently it cracked a wall. Thankfully I don't buy my chicken there (Bole is just too far away), and I definitely don't catch busses (not those type, anyway). If this is true, I guess the Department of Foreign Affairs and Tourism was not completely out of their tree after all. Who knows who the culprits were, however.

In other, less explosive, news, we (that being, the staff at Bingham) just returned from a relaxing weekend at Babugaya, a retreat centre on a scenic crater lake about an hour and a half's drive from Addis. The most exciting event (in a negative way) was narrowly missing an Ethiopian woman who was running in the middle of a particularly dark section of the road.

We also saw the two episodes of the Amazing Race which went through Ethiopia. We had heard about this about three months ago, and were anticipating the racers arguing with customs officials, struggling with local public transport, being accosted by beggars and sleeping on the street with some of the locals outside one of the local monuments, waiting for it to open. Instead, they had to put mud/animal manure onto walls, put a roof on a hut, coral a pair of donkeys, match a cross-shaped necklace and run a 4x400m relay. It seems that reality is not all it's cracked up to be...

The Internet feeds the hungry!

The poor of Ethiopia need Ebay! According to Meles Zenawi, a good Internet connection is the "weapon that they need to fight poverty at the earliest possible time". Brilliant! This ranks up there with the government's current primary and secondary school education method - wide-screen plasma TVs emitting pre-packaged lessons (in English) to every public school in Ethiopia. Their teachers now just turn on the screen at the start of the lesson, and turn it off at the end. Why won't Bingham let me teach that way?

Term break!

Yay! Term 2 is over. Only one to go. It seems somewhat surreal that I will be leaving here in about 3 months. Time flies...

On the last two days of school we had the 'Memory Verse Prize', which is a reward for all the kids who memorise and recite all their memory verses for the term. This term it was a day walking through a local National Park. Thursday was grades 5-9 and Friday was grades K-4. Grades 10-12 all had exams this week, so they couldn't come.

Unfortunately, quite a few of the students on the Thursday trip didn't quite make it there. The bus they were travelling in (driven by a local) was involved in a minor accident. Thankfully nobody was seriously injured. Apparently the bus was travelling behind another car, which stopped suddenly at a bridge to let a truck by. The bus had too much momentum to stop, so the driver swerved around the car, only to clip the other vehicle on the front corner. The other car lost control and tipped off the side of the road. Thankfully, it was only occupied by the driver, who was ok. The driver of our bus, however, decided that sticking around was a bad idea and headed for the hills.

After the event, quite a few of the kids just came home, although several continued on to the park. High drama all around!

The next day's trip (which I was on) was much more pleasant and much less stressful. I and another leader were with 6 fourth-grade boys and we hiked out about 10km to a nice little waterfall. A fun day out, all said. And no car accidents.

Well, I've got to get back to avoiding my grading. Until next time...

Blogging in Addis

After a long period of neglect, I have finally uploaded (and post-dated) my newsletters since last April. Some of them are quite long, so you could be in for a bit of a sit-down-session if you read them all. Also, you can now subscribe to this blog with your favourite RSS or Atom reader. Exciting!

In more recent news, we are in our last week of term here at Bingham. This holiday I am planning on doing nothing much, just for a change of pace. Other than grading and report writing, that is. A teacher's job is never done...