Keye Amemba School

Monday 24th March

While the UK are basking in the golden sunshine of a Bank Holiday w/e, I’ve been working. Still the weather’s good. Spent part of the morning working on ‘continuous assessment ‘ projects.

I was visited by Karolyn from Italy with her Ethiopian guide Melesh who has a lot of experience working with NGOs and volunteers. He lives in Azezo close to Gorgora which is on the Northern coast of Lake Tana. He has offered to show me around and also to organise any treks that I want to make – Meleshew knows him and says he’s a good man so that looks promising. Karolyn is with an Italian NGO working on a thesis about the effects of HIV and Aids – she has been interviewing women in Azezo but needs access to a younger group – Meleshew is going to organise this for Wednesday.

Several members of the CCU committee called in to check on the arrangements for the afternoon lesson observations. But at 8 o’clock – time to go – it was suddenly announced that all administration staff must go to a meeting. This included Meleshew, Mulugeta, and all the drivers! After a drawn out, heated debate, Mulat turned up to take us to Keye Amemba school.



Classrooms

We started off with 4, picked up Alemayhu on route wandering back from wherever he had been for lunch and finally Melku in Gonder so eventually 7 of us turned up at the school. The Director was not available (again) but the heads of department sorted out classes for us to visit.



Staff Room!

I went to a Grade 5 (15 year olds) session on Civics. The session consisted of a discussion between individuals and the teacher about how Ethiopia could develop economically, socially and geographically. The teacher periodically summarised the discussion – 2 keys issues were ‘educating women was more important because they were primarily responsible for teaching the children’ and ‘if you don’t work, you don’t eat’ The youngsters were reading from their exercise books – the topic had been set for homework and they were discussing the ideas that they had come up with.



The man on the mobile is Ato Alemayhu, CTE Instructor and head of CCU. The man in white coat with his hands on his hips is Ato Mohabaw whose civics lesson I observed.

There were approximately 70 children in the class, boys outnumbered girls by 2 -1 but this was even more so when it came to speaking.