Back in Action

Today is the third holiday (of four) in a ten-day period. Sunday was Ethiopian Easter (fasika), and most people are taking the bulk of the week off to be with their families. I, meanwhile, am working on getting my life in Bahir Dar sorted out after nearly four weeks away. All the chores have built up, and I'm fighting the urge to just sit and read in the cool shade of my front porch all day.

 

It's been a busy few weeks. In-Service "Training" complete; I think that it left most of us feeling that there was something to be desired. I'm beginning to realize how much of this experience is going to be dictated by the effort that I myself choose to put into it, rather than by anything Peace Corps or ITECH can do for me. I'm going to have to make this work on my own. Which is okay (good, even), but certainly presents a bit of a challenge. It's awfully easy to be complacent and to just enjoy hanging out and having few responsibilities. Motivation is going to have to come from myself, and that's not always the easiest. I'm working on finding a balance of structure imposed on myself and also just letting things unfold as they will. And continuously reminding myself that it's still early, and that I have lots of time to figure out what exactly my place here should look like.

 

After training, a group of seven of us went up to the Simien Mountains, three or four hours North of Gondar. We spent 4 days up in the mountains, hiking and camping and seeing all sorts of fabulous animals. Gelada Baboons are a new favorite. The males look like little lions, and the females carry their babies piggyback, clinging onto the mommas' backs. They're pretty adapted to humans (several thousand people actually live in the national park), but by no means tame. You can get pretty close up to them, though—I'd say that I got within about 6 feet of a family. We also saw Klipspringer (antelope) and Walia Ibex, as well as jackals and all sorts of interesting birds and tons of cool plants. This park is a pretty special place. I'm not sure that "mountains" really describes it best. The landscape is completely alien. Almost like the rocky spires in the Grand Canyon combined with the shrubby high altitude tundra of the Northern New Mexico/Southern Colorado mountains, with a little bit of Mongolian or Russian steppes thrown in for good measure. Seeing the sun rise over a huge abyss on the last morning was one of the most beautiful things I've experienced, the layers of mountains in the distance turning from deep grey to dark blue to brilliant green and yellow and ochre-red. I took about a hundred landscape photos (between the seven of us, we must have taken 1,000!), but not one can capture that beauty and magnificence. We tossed a stone down one of the canyons and estimated 6 seconds for it to land. That means it was almost 600 feet deep (thanks, Dad, for the math reminder on that one…). And six seconds was a conservative estimate. These are some big mountains.

 

It was coooold up in the mountains, and we all wore most of our clothing most of the time. I'm fairly certain that no article of clothing has ever been as dirty as my favorite purple sweatshirt was when I washed it on Tuesday after coming back down. I take that back. I haven't yet washed my socks from the trip…

 

An article was published about Peace Corps recently than focused in part on the Ethiopia program. It's at http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20080425/ts_csm/opeacecorps;_ylt=AjH.oCVEqOGhNjRa3lG9HNys0NUE. I'd love to hear what you think of it. Some of us were a bit dismayed. While I'm sure that older volunteers with a lifetime of experience do have a lot to offer Peace Corps (as they do in any field), I'm not so sure that experience is as closely correlated with success in the Peace Corps as this article makes it out to be. That is, I think that there are a lot of young "inexperienced" volunteers here in this program who have a lot (a LOT) to offer. And I think it's important to keep in mind that Peace Corps isn't exactly a development organization—two of its three goals are about cultural exchange. Let's keep in mind what we're trying to achieve. Granted, I'm not totally convinced that the Peace Corps is always a useful way to spend taxpayers' dollars, but I do think that volunteers can and do accomplish something around the world. Measuring those accomplishments is clearly a tough task, though, especially as the Peace Corps moves from teaching English and helping with agriculture to tackling immensely complicated, politicized issues like HIV/AIDS. As an aside, I thought that the statement that PC hasn't been politicized was one of the more laughable assertions in this article. I'd love to hear opinions on the article, especially from RPCVs.

 

Hope that you're all well. It's been too long since I've posted anything. I'll try to be in better touch in the next weeks and months.