The crowd walking to the Jan Meda raceground during the Ethiopian Epiphany celebrations in Addis

Jo was able to send along some of her observations about one of our newest destinations, Ethiopia. Enjoy!

I spent two and a half months in Addis helping set up our projects there, and I’ll admit I was really surprised by Ethiopia. Before I went, my only vision of Ethiopia was that of starving, wide-eyed children in a drought prone dusty wasteland, and I half expected that Addis would be similar, and I couldn’t have been more wrong! Addis Ababa has to be one of the most welcoming places I’ve ever had the pleasure to live in.

The city itself feels like a challenge at first; there is no discernable city centre, few known street names, and a huge sprawling expanse of suburbs, many of which appear to begin right in the centre of what you thought was a business district – but once you find your way around (which took me about a week, but which takes volunteers a lot less time with our help!), you get that special sense of achievement that you always have when living as a foreigner overseas, of “I know where I’m going, I use public transport, and I’m one of the masses”. People who see you on buses stare in amazement, since they are only used to seeing white faces behind the wheel of huge white SUV’s, and I’m sure they imagine that people don’t use public transport in the west! I love surprising people, and changing their ideas, so every short trip to meet friends or go for coffee brought a smile to my face.

Addis is set in the central highlands at an altitude of 2500-3000m – the main benefit of which is that the whole city is surrounded by mountains covered in beautiful alpine forests, so sunsets are stunning, and if you ever get the chance to get to the top of a tall building, the view is amazing! The other benefit is that short day trips for picnics or to visit churches in the hills are really easy to do – perfect if you love the great outdoors and can’t stay too long in a bustling city!

The altitude also makes for lovely weather. Ethiopia claims to get “13 Months of sunshine” – and it’s almost true – the sun really does shine everyday! During the day it’s warm enough that you can get away with just wearing a shirt, but without being so hot you break into a sweat, and once the sun goes down at around 6pm, it turns cooler.

Learn more about transportation around the city, using two different time systems and Jo’s favorite things after the jump!
Transport in Addis Is superb. Everybody in Addis owns either a donkey, a Lada, or minibus. Being a westerner, I don’t think the novelty value of crossing the street next to a heavily laden donkey will ever wear off!

All the Lada’s and minibuses are painted white and blue, designating them as taxis, and the minibuses are by far the cheapest and best way to get about. They cost as little as 65 cents (about 0.01 USD), run all over the city, and you never have to wait more than a few minutes for one to come along – it makes public transport in England look shameful!

One amusing aspect of life here is the use of two clocks - Ethiopians (quite rightly) argue that the day doesn’t start at midnight, rather the day starts when the day starts, i.e. when the sun comes up. Thus, 6am is 00.00, 9am is 3am, 4 pm is 10am, and so on. As you can imagine, this makes it somewhat impossible to meet anyone without an obligatory ten minutes of confusing discussion about whether you mean 4pm Ethiopian, or European time! In the annual sense, Ethiopia also has it’s own calendar, which is 7 days shorter out of every year than the Gregorian calendar we use in the west, making January 13th 2007, actually 5th May 1999! They’ve got some amazing millennium parties planned for about 7 months time if anyone fancies it….!

My two favourite things about Addis though, are the people, and the coffee. Ethiopian people are so welcoming, generous to a fault, and absolutely fascinated by westerners – having a ‘ferenje’ (foreigner) friends here is considered quite “cool”, so I had offers of meeting up for coffee coming out of my ears! People here love laughing and dancing, so there’s always a celebration around the corner.
We’ve had an amazing response from locals about the projects we’ve set up, and there’s a huge variety of work on offer.

Teaching English is really important here, since the lingua franca, Amharic, hasn’t developed sufficiently to adapt to the wealth of new words used in fields such as Science and Technology, which is why all subjects are taught in English from grade 7 - so it’s especially important in Ethiopia that children get a good grounding from an early age.

If you chose to do care work, there’s plenty to be done, and again, a huge variety – you could chose to work with babies, toddlers, under-privileged or disabled kids in day care centres, or even join in with our new public health education campaign to teach kids about personal hygiene.

I truly loved Ethiopia, and even though I’ve only been back a week, I miss her dearly. Now all I need to do is convince my boss to give me about six months off so I can go back as a volunteer…..!!