Volunteering for Charity in Ethiopia – Katie Prescott’s Optimist Blog
Last updated 8/7/2009 10:29:18 AM
Volunteering for Charity in Ethiopia – Katie Prescotts Optimist Blog
7 August 2009
EEF Student Musbah
For the past week, we have spent every day with our guide, 18 year old EEF student – Musbah. The Ethiopian Education Foundation a UK Charity (EEF) provides excellent schooling for severely under-privileged yet motivated and academically promising students in Ethiopia, helping them reach their full academic potential and enabling them to drive real change in Ethiopia. Established by 3 friends who shared a vision to cause positive change in Ethiopia, EEF is giving its students an otherwise unattainable secondary school education and with it the knowledge and skills that they believe will change not only the student's lives but also the fortunes of one of Africa's poorest nations.
Musbah is interning with us as his summer job, while also waiting to find out in a few weeks time which Ethiopian university he has got a place at to study medicine. His fellow EEF students are interning at the Home, where we spend our afternoons playing and working with the children. The EEF students have found it tough to get paid summer jobs in Addis, as apparently the system is
very nepotistic. If you don't know the owner of a business through a relative network, they're unlikely to take you on.
I don't know what we would do without him. Our (very) few words of Amharic don't carry us very far. We're still not completely up to
speed on the minibus system...cries of ‘Arat Kilo' and ‘Piazza' are fine, but anything else and we're pretty thrown. Musbah is also very
knowledgeable about Ethiopian history, politics and culture. And not just Ethiopian, I caught him giving some of the children in the Home a whistle stop tour of 20th century politics the other day.
Having been to the UK and Spain, he's keen to reciprocate and show us around Addis, answering our often inane questions about what and why something is as it is. We have been to the Ethiopian National Museum and seen Lucy – the missing link, as well as Haile Selassie's throne. He took us to Addis Ababa University where we climbed up the ‘facist' steps, built by Mussolini – one for each day of fascism. (A slightly pointless unfinished external spiral staircase). These now seem to be used by celebrating graduates.
Inside the university we saw the Institute of Ethiopian studies founded by Richard Pankhurst – son of Sylvia Pankhurst (of suffragette), who was one of Ethiopia's strongest supporters during the Italian and British occupations. When she died in Ethiopia, Haile Selassie gave her a state funeral. (For more on this, read Michela Wrong's brilliant "I didn't do it for you".) Richard Pankhurst is now the world's leading authority on Ethiopia.
As well as giving us a cultural tour of the city, Musbah has been introducing us to the city's culinary delights. We've had lots of injera" – a grey cloth like substance made of fermented ‘tef' (alocal grain) onto which toppings are piled. It is very delicious, although we still haven't quite got the neat local rolling technique – instead using more of a touristic pinch, to everyone's amusement.
Thursday evening, we suggested that on our way back from the Home we would stay around the Piazza area to eat and then head home. ‘Alone?' said Musbah ‘without me?'. When we suggested that this was our plan, he shook his finger at us and forbad it strictly. Like an over-protective brother there was nothing we could do. He didn't like the idea of two English girls wondering around Addis by themselves at night. Like an over-protective brother there was nothing we could do. Although we did consider going a few stops on the bus and then hopping off when he wasn't looking....
Next Page >> The Home