Happy Holidays

The first instalment of our “Northern Circuit” was Bahir Dar, the so called Ethiopian Riviera. It’s approximately 500 km north of Addis, and we arrived on a Saturday afternoon after a very straight forward flight up from the capital. We had travelled to Addis the day before on the bus from Harar. The trip through the rift valley was no less spectacular than I remembered it although the novelty of 12 sweaty hours on a non air conditioned bus is now wearing off somewhat, and I think future Addis escapades will be done by plane. But that’s getting off track....

My first impression of Bahir Dar was the airport which is not exactly grand. It’s basically a shed, complete with corrugate iron roof. It does however have a proper conveyer belt to get your bags off – it comes in a hole in the wall of the shed and is approximately 2.5 meters long before it disappears out the of another hole. The area inside the circular belt is probably the size of your average dining table, and any bag placed on it would, I imagine, take about 20 seconds to make the full circuit. Needless to say I didn’t get to find out exactly how long it does take because when the little cart with our bags pulled up, they were just unloaded into the hands of their waiting owners and the little conveyer belt was bypassed completely.

Bahir Dar itself is a lovely town. It’s far more lush and tropical that Harar which has now become very dry and dusty. The tropical feel is thanks to the proximity of Lake Tana, the largest lake in Ethiopia and source of the famous Blue Nile River (it joins with the White Nile to make the Nile we’ve all heard of in case you were wondering). We stayed in the Ghion hotel which has a lovely spot on the lake shore, and amazing gardens full of birds. Now, I have never been much of a twitcher, but Ethiopian birds would convert the hardiest bird hater.  Pelicans, marabou storks, crowned cranes, touracos, paradise flycatchers, bee eaters, hornbills – the sheer size and variety, and the beautiful colours are amazing. The high light of our stay in Bahir Dar was an amazing evening boat trip with our guide Hailu, who knew where all the best bird watching spots are. It was magical to see them all at sunset, settling down for the night. And to top it all off we got a fantastic display from Lake Tana’s resident Hippos, when a mother and her calf had decided to emerge onto the bank unusually early to feed. It was a brilliant night.

While in Bahir Dar we also did the usual tourist attractions of the Island Monasteries, and the Blue Nile falls.  Although I’m glad we did these they were both a little disappointing when compared to our brilliant bird watching trip. We also caught up with a few other VSO volunteers who either live in BD or were passing through and ate some really amazing fish (well it might not have been that amazing but it was my first fish other than tinned tuna for 5 months).

So that was Bahir Dar. There are some photos (well quite a lot actually), but as Calum is still in Addis trying to sort out his visa and has the camera, I can’t load any up just yet... maybe with Happy Holidays 2 – the mighty Simien Mountains!

Ciao for now x

Hello Again

Hi folks,

Sorry for the absence of posting over the last few weeks. I had an unbelievably busy two weeks at work with medical student exams to write and give, and a resus training proposal to submit (project proposals and budgets have never been part of my job before), which coupled with rubbish internet access and then two weeks lovely, lovely holiday have meant a pause in the blogging. Hopefully I should be back to blogging regularly over the next few weeks, though, to fill you in on my holiday, and life and work in general here in Ethiopia.

I actually wrote the following entry before my holiday but owing to the lack on internet access never managed to post it.....

The pros and cons of a no appointment system

In Ethiopia very little is planned. You don’t get appointments for anything because for most people they can’t be reliably kept. There are a multitude of reasons for this, from things that happen at home to the buses that don’t have a timetable and just go when they’re full.

In some ways this is really frustrating. For instance, when Calum first arrived it took him nearly 4 weeks to be able to meet the president of the University and offer his services to the engineering department, because every time we went to see him, he had just left or was in a meeting or “in Addis”. He’ll be back later today, tomorrow, next week we were told. Can we have an appointment? It’s a possibility (everything is here!) but we don’t know when he’s free...

At other times though it’s a blessing.  Last week I went with Biftu, the dean of the college of health sciences, on a little fact finding mission for our planned newborn life support course. Our aim was to visit all 6 hospitals in Harar, as wel l as the Regional Health board to find out if they would be interested in further training for their staff in newborn life support, how many staff they need us to train and what facilities they have at present.

If at home you walked into a hospital unannounced and asked to see the medical director or head of nursing and expected a tour of the facilities then and there, you would get laughed out the door. And can you imagine knocking on the door of the vice president of the regional health board, and him not only being delighted to see you, but immediately summoning the person who has the information that you need. Well that is how it happened here. We were met with a very positive response in every hospital (except the army hospital who didn’t want any foreign nationals anywhere near their base thank you!) I am delighted although now just a teensy bit stressed about just how much we have taken on with this course. While I think it is desperately needed and will be so beneficial for the population here, it is going to be a huge amount of work and I hope we can manage to do it properly given how much we already have to keep us busy here.

Anyway, I’m off on holiday for two weeks as of tomorrow so I can not think about it until I get back. We will be spending time in Bahir dar, Gondar, the Simien Mountains and Lalibela. This means no blog entries for the next fortnight at least, but also lots and lots of blog fodder and photos when I get back.