Never in my life have I been anywhere as hectic as Ethiopia. Even though I knew that it was going to be a completely different world than Canada, I could not have imagined how big the gap would be. I also expected to be looked at in a funny way when I went places, as I don’t exactly look like the typical Ethiopian… But once again, the extent to which I have been stared at is much larger than I had expected. Since this is such a densely populated country, everywhere we it feels like there are 100 eyes glaring our way. They don’t look at us in an overly scary or happy way, it just seems as though people who we walk by are curious as to why we are here.
We went to the school the first day to get acquainted with the dean and maybe talk to some students about our program. We thought they would have had a few posters for our course up before we came, but it turns out they thought us and the Leader program were the same people, so they only promoted their program. As such we had to switch up our plan so we went from class to class, pitching our course to the students and actually got 76 students to sign up. This was way more than we expected, but unfortunately only around 15 students actually showed up for the first class. We blame this mostly on ourselves; we probably could have commutated in more ways to the students when the class was going to start and which class specifically they were in. By the second class there was around 35 attending so at least we learned from our mistakes.
The difference in English-speaking ability from student to student is very interesting here. We were initially paired up with two students, Beta and Adi. Solely based on their lack of accents I would have guessed both of them were from North America. They explained that most of their talents came from watching movies, so initially we thought that a lot of the students would be similar to them. Over our first few classes we have learned that abilities range from students with very thick accents to no accents at all. Even more interestingly this doesn’t seem to be a determining factor in who participates in class; some students who have no accents at all don’t participate in class while others who have a really tough time constantly have their hands up. This is something that I definitely wasn’t expecting but was very happy to see.
Other than the schoolwork we have done a ton of sightseeing. During the first few days we saw the National Museum of Ethiopia. This is where “Lucy”, the oldest humanoid skeleton known to man (3.2 million years old) is held, along with a multitude of other artifacts and pictures are held. We have gone to many other churches, mosques, museums all in very different parts of the city.
It seems as though we are all getting very used to the Ethiopian life: we’re learning some parts of the language (Amharic), eating injera, taking minibuses to get around and much more so our outlook is good. Hopefully we can plan a trip outside the city in the coming weekends so we can get a feel of all of Ethiopia and not just the capital city of Addis Ababa.
Justin
Alex
Kyle
Ethan