12th August 2008

In honour of several friends in London, this blog will be in point form!

1) I've been here two weeks today, though it honestly feels like months. London seems a long, long time ago. Time goes very slowly in Ethiopia – an hour in England seems to stretch out to a whole day in Ethiopia, and sometimes you can find you've done a whole day's work and it's only 11 o clock!

2) I know this blog is a lot more about me than the orphanage, for which I apologise. I haven't been able to focus much on the work we are doing at the orphanage for two main reasons for this:

• Every time anyone connected to us travels to Ethiopia, we bring a lot of money and resources to the orphanage, but we still have a sizeable sum of money which needs to be sent by bank transfer. This is proving a very slow process, as we attempt to get the banks to talk to one another, and we try to gather all the information that each end of the transfer needs (you'd be astounded at how difficult this is!).
• Even though things such as this move very slowly in Ethiopia, circumstances can change very, very quickly! For instance, the money we raised for the kitchen was all of a sudden not needed as the orphanage had changed premises, and so we had to work out where best to allocate the money, trying to keep everyone who had donated happy as well as responding to the orphanage's needs. Similarly, we had just managed to get a child sponsoring system in place when, due to the global economic situation, the price of every basic need in Ethiopia has risen so much that £15 a month is not enough to sponsor one child anymore. So we are back to the drawing board on that one, too.

Consequently, it often seems as if nothing is happening, but I promise it is! It's just all happening behind the scenes!

3) One update from the orphanage is that they have a new child! H is 3 years old and she lost her mother to HIV/AIDs a while ago. Her father is also HIV+ and is now too sick to look after her and asked Hanna to take her in. H is the sweetest and happiest child I know, and everyone just wants to hug her the minute she comes into the room! She is living in the Wollo Seffer site with some of the other little ones.

4) Every morning, I teach 25 grade 3 students very basic English. I've taught before, but this is definitely a new experience for me! The children are wonderful, but I have very few resources to teach with so it's all about making do – paper, pens, exercise books and coloured pencils, although available, are scarce. So no information sheets, no laminated flash cards, no bright beautiful pictures (well, apart from the ones I draw myself!!). The children only have one exercise book for all their lessons, so I can't take it in to mark it, and the room is so small that I can't always get to the children at the back to help them.

But we muddle along – it's fun, and as they learn the English, I learn the Amharic! Although I finish most lessons covered in chalk dust, and half of the children still call me 'Jelly', we are slowly getting somewhere!

If anyone does want to send me anything, things that will be most gratefully received are:

- coloured pencils

- pictures of people doing things eg swimming, running, reading, talking, eating, sleeping etc. Anything that will help teaching verbs!!

- Stickers – those 99p ones from Woolworths! Smiley faces and stars are particularly welcome, but footballs are also good!

- Any kind of educational material: not necessarily books, but things like word charts, or the alphabet, or flash cards for learning vocabulary.

5) I went to bed with a terrible headache last night, and by midnight I'd convinced myself I had some sort of terrible tropical disease, probably malaria considering the number of mosquito bites on my legs! But I woke up this morning, clearly not dead, and chances are I'm probably not suffering from Malaria. Better safe than sorry, though, huh?! :o)