A Cultural Lesson

Yesterday we had a cultural lesson where we all found out we have all gained an extra seven years as Ethiopia celebrated its 2002 New Year the day before we arrived! Ethiopia also has an interesting way of telling the time which means you may be asked to attend a meeting at 3 in the morning! They start counting the time when the sun rises (about 6am) 9am would be 3 in the morning for them. They do the same from sunset so you have 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night. Last night we decided to teach ourselves Ethiopian dancing by watching and copying various music videos from different regions in Ethiopia. Some were easier than others but they all ended up with us rolling around in laughter. Most involved a lot of shoulder movement and bouncing up and down. A particularly interesting video involved a girl with an impossibly flexible head... quite scary. I wish I knew what the song was called so you could look out for it on youtube! Today a number of us had our last Amharic lesson before we move onto our second language, Oromo. I'd like to say I've mastered Amharic and am ready to move on but with 6 hours behind me I feel totally lost. We've whizzed through things so quickly and have had no time to consolidate any of our learning. I can hardly say the basics like 'how are you?', 'where do you live?', 'how much is this?' and am still quite sketchy on the numbers . But tomorrow we need to put all that learning aside and move onto what we have affectionately termed our new language learning – 'OROMOTHERAPY'! This afternoon we visited the British Embassy for a medical briefing. I was really impressed that they not only seemed to have imported lots of English flowers for the garden but had also imported some good old English rain! It poured the whole time we were there and stopped as we left the gates. We then visited the VSO programme office and then headed from there in groups around Addis on a 'scavenger hunt'. This was just a bit of fun to get us out an about in Addis and required us to catch buses, find various landmarks, get costs for various items and even get our shoes shined! We raced against the other teams to get back the pub. At the moment our ICT (in country training) leaders are sat behind me with a collection of silly and not so silly prizes (including a woolly hat in the Ethiopian colours) debating which team deserves each prize. Meanwhile, the power keeps cutting and I am very grateful for the long battery life on my laptop.