... the aftermath of indian food
Trip Start
Sep 18, 2005
1
5
24
Trip End
Ongoing
Addis Abeba, Ethiopia
Sunday, October 9, 2005
This weekend has been really great, and despite us not making out to Lake Langano- everyone who we talked to about getting a tour wanted to charge us an arm and a leg- it has been very very fulfilling.
We spent friday night at "the Coffee house" an saw a Jazz show. It was an Ethio-sudanese jazz band but had three guests performing from Germany. It was nice to unwind after a crazy week at work.
Works' been very busy, but I always feel bad when I can't seem to accomplish as much as I want- I have spent much of the time reading about HIV specific to Ethiopia this past week and it's helped a lot. The nurses are getting ready for the General Assembly where we'll have about 700 nurses in attendence, so we'll be doing our survey there and hopefully get a good representation not only of needlestick injuries- but now- after having spoken with the Canadian Nurses Association- they also want us to assess general knowledge about HIV.
I feel like I'm always going to be multitasking here, and I'm trying to cram my brain full of reports so that I can have a better understanding of how HIV has been dealt with in the past. The world bank has an amazing article on it's HIV program, and one of the case studies is on Ethiopia, so I have an AMAZING history of the disease full of the conflict and political situations to complement it.
We're trying to do some surveys about needlestick injuries but also about general knowledge nurses have in relation to HIV and though we have money to do it in Addis (the General assembly where 700 nurses from around ethiopia come to Addis for a conference)- we want to go out to the rural areas where 85% of the population lives! and this... I'm finding is costly. We just applied to the Equinet Student grant and are managing to work with Addis Ababa University to get a student to take the project to one rural setting... but we don't have that money yet...
Anyhow... on Saturday we went to Merkato and I swear I've never seen so many shoes!! We walked around and saw everything from donkeys to sewing machines... be warned... i may be getting one!! :)
It was little harder to walk through Merkato again. I had a little breakdown...but recovered quickly. Being around the mosque for some reason was so inspiring. Religion here has a very different meaning. You begin to respect people so much for it here because a lot of the time it provides the only hope they feel they have. After that we got back on the Minibus...to come home
Minibuses are a story for later!... we went to Edna and Telale's for dinner and had lovely ethiopian food... they are such lovely people we also found out Telale is 76!! ... (they are the people we pseudo live with)
Oh, the best thing happened to Katie and I on Saturday as we were leaving for Merkato. This little girl with her mom (she was probably 3) ran up to katie and I and said, hello!... then she proceeded to giggle and give us hugs, and then pat our faces and giggle.. it was priceless... Katie and I couldn't stop smiling all day.
This is long enough for now... I'm going to update the rest at a later date... :)
xoxox
Ciao!
