Arrival in Ethiopia
I have arrived in Ethiopia and am settling in pretty well. Arrival in Addis Abeba was slightly worrying when it hit me that I will be miles away from home surrounded by new people for 6 months with no familiar faces such as Alexis (Mr Funny) to pull me along. The feeling soon passed as I got to meet other IRC employees, all who are really friendly be it bosses, fellow interns and drivers. Hell even the finance department seem friendly which makes a significant change from my previous job at LateRooms.
So I spent my first day (Sunday) wandering around Addis, trying to get a feel for the city, and I got caught in a deluge, which seems to be a regular occurence in the capital of the land of 13 months of sunshine. After getting into a rammed minibus I headed towards what I thought was the centre... turns out there IS no centre in Addis, just neighbourhood after neighbourhood of stalls, government buildings, houses and complexes housing anything from restaurants and bookstores to offices and nightclubs. So after successfully dodging a pickpocket in the minibus I got out in the wrong place and then had a long walk back to where I meant to head. Though Addis seems relatively easy to navigate it is impossible to know where you are at any one point. I can't say it's a particularly nice city, but the people are very friendly and there are so many things to do at night, such as restaurants offering traditional dancing and ethiopian jazz bars which are amazing.
Workwise I've been in an office all week doing background reading whilst waiting for my eventual deployment into the field so generally boring, but as I said before the workmates are cool. Next week I go to Asebe Teferi for training in the PHAST toolkit which is about participative hygiene promotion (the mainstay of my project) and the week after I finally head towards Awassa so that I can devise a monitoring programme for PHAST. I'll also be satisfying my technical geeky urges by designing/rehabilitating some water schemes. Overall I don't think I will have as much direct contact with communities as I would have liked, but at least what I am doing will be filling in gaps in my knowledge.
I've been hearing about NGO relationships too especially involving the UN, IRC and Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF). Having not had anything to do with the UN I cannot say personally, but the overall concensus is that they are horribly disorganised and massively bureaucratic (but hey its INTERNATIONAL government, maybe they deserve a break). IRC for the moment I tend to see them as bureaucratic, but I'm sure I'll find that all NGOs are to a certain extent. MSF as far as I can gather seem to be very idealistic, and thus rub many people up the wrong way, though I have yet to discover why. However, as if to confirm this, MSF have just been thrown out of Niger for exaggerating health statistics. As MSF is a group I was hoping to work for I'll have to look into this some more. As I said I don't mean to pass any judgements, especially not about IRC, that will no doubt happen closer to the end of my internship ;) To be honest it doesn't feel like much at all has happened yet.