Ethiopia: the land of bread and honey

I arrived in Ethiopia on the 16^th of January 2020. My projected arrival date was the 30^th of December 2019 but that didn’t materialise for a number of reasons. The main reasons included extra requirements for the work permit in Ethiopia (something the Ethiopian Government has recently tightened up on) which was difficult to obtain over the Christmas break (I arrived back in the UK on the 17^th of December). So, police checks being validated, GP notes and letters of good standing held the process up. The irony is that not one of these things were actually necessary for my work VISA. Which I will now receive in the next few days.

Ethiopia really is something else. I really had no idea what to expect as this is my first time in the heart of Africa. A new continent, with a rich and ancient history that holds the keys to human evolution (one of the oldest human skeletons – Lucy – was exhumed in Ethiopia and is currently a museum in Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia). It is also diverse in religion, ethnicity and language. Federalism abounds in Ethiopia, with each state being defined by its own ethnic groups. Orthodox Ethiopian Christianity permeates here, which is one of the most ancient, and arguably ‘pure’, forms of Christianity in the world. Stories of King Solomon, The Queen of Sheba and the Ark of the Covenant are woven throughout Ethiopian history. Yet, its most-spoken language is Amharic - a Semitic language, like Hebrew and Arabic. Thus, Judaism and Islam have their very visible spaces within Ethiopian culture too. The richness of this history can’t help but affect you at a very deep level. Every second I am reminded that I am somewhere very, very special.

I’ve been here just over a week now. I arrived when things were slowing down for Timkat – a religious ceremony more important than Christmas here. It is officially celebrated on the 19^th of January (20^th in a leap year) but it is in fact a three-day festival commemorating Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan River. A replica of the Ark of the Covenant (apparently the actual Ark is in Axum in Ethiopia and only its true guardian can gain access to it – strong echoes of Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade; both more than likely influenced by this history) is brought to Addis Ababa and people stay out all night to celebrate. There are processions and lots of singing, music and dancing. It was utterly spectacular.

So, the last few days have been about my induction into my new role, learning some basic Amharic, and familiarising myself with the work VSO Ethiopia and other INGOs have been doing in Ethiopia regarding the education and teacher training of refugees. Ethiopia has, arguably, one of the most open-door policies to refugees in the whole of Africa. It currently hosts approximately 850 000 refugees in 26 refugee camps. The locations of these refugee camps match the most populous refugee community – Eritreans in Tigray; South Sudanese in Gambella; Somalians in Somali, and the Sudanese in Beneshangul-Gumuz. However, there are also refugees from Yemen, other countries in the Middle East and other African countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

My role here is to design needs assessments for various groups within the refugee camps (including governmental and non-governmental organisations who ‘administrate’ the refugees) to discern the barriers that female teachers face when teaching in these refugee camps. I will also be designing a training package to train current and future (mostly local) volunteers in how to design, implement and analyse these needs assessments. I am working closely with another international volunteer (who will arrive tomorrow) and we will split into four research groups after the training has been designed and implemented. Over a period of 4-6 weeks I will be hands-on collecting data from approximately 5 refugee camps (across two districts). Then, it will be back to Addis Ababa to analyse the data in groups and prepare the final report.  

Just when I was designing the needs assessments, disaster struck. I have a frozen neck caused by poor quality pillows (the hotel has two varieties of pillow – one that is so chunky it could hold open a door, and the second so thin and uneven you feel as if you are lying on nothing with some small bumps). The injury is actually quite serious – after two visits to a very impressive Saint Gabriel’s hospital in Addis Ababa, they isolated that I tore a ligament in my neck. So, I’m not supposed to be doing any work (and certainly not supposed to be typing this) and getting sufficient rest to let the inflammation die down and my muscles to relax enough to let the healing commence. I’m on anti-inflammatories and muscle relaxants to help me do this. They suspect it will take at least a week for it to heal. If it doesn’t, I’ve to get an MRI scan. I did get an x-ray already and it’s all fine – bones all doing what they should be doing which is a relief.

So, I just have to take it easy. Do some work but then stop and rest when the pain gets too much. The good news is that I’m not expected to go out to the refugee camps for another couple of weeks yet so that should give me sufficient time to heal. But, it is stopping me from going out sightseeing. I can’t turn my head which makes crossing the very busy roads here very difficult! But, sometimes you just need to rest to prepare yourself for what is to come. I’m taking this as a sign that this is what I should be doing right now.

Disputing what is 'development' and leaving Ecuador

It's been two months since I last updated. I'm writing this belated post from the UK, and have since re-named this blog and its purpose. This indicates that some massive changes have gone afoot. On the 16th of November 2019 I gave Manna Project International in Ecuador my one-month notice. I have been one of five volunteers who have left the INGO in the last four months.

I will write another time, and in another format, about what was actually going on and how this influenced five women to disrupt their plans for a year and choose to go home / somewhere else rather than stay with the organisation. What I will say on this format is: it is very, very difficult to do development work when you and your colleagues agree on a definition of development but the organisation you work with doesn't. I actually wrote about this in my doctoral thesis. When a discourse of development (or community development) is not shared by a community / international development project or organisation, it will result in socially antagonistic relationships within the project or organisation. What occurs is that the dominant discourse creates particular subject positions for each individual within the project to adopt. So, if someone comes into a community / international development project with a different understanding of community or international development, they will struggle to fit into the subject positions available to them under the discourse. They really have two options: (i) re-frame and adopt the available subject position under the dominant discourse, or (ii) adopt the available subject position but work to gradually change the discourse from the inside to create your preferred subject position.

I did the latter with this particular INGO, and I was working with intelligent women who had also 'chosen' ii. But, if ii is not working (even if the organisation is saying it wants to change but the realities of changing discourses are extraordinarily complicated) then the third option is to leave. In my professional opinion, this is what happened with five of us. Only two volunteers have stayed and, for the record, they agree with our definition of community development, but they have adopted i or ii for their own reasons.

The real lesson for the organisation here is not to advertise themselves as promoting a particular discourse of development when the reality is they are operating a different one. We have tried to feed this back in a number of different ways, but some people really struggle to see how two discourses are different (or admit to themselves they are - one 'sounds' better so they advertise that but its too difficult, or costly, to implement in reality so they operationalise a different one). Since we have left, people have since informed me that the official line is that the five of us misunderstood what the organisation was trying to do and are working towards communicating themselves better, which should mean a different type of person will be attracted to them and accept the subject positions they offer. I wish them the very best of luck. In this climate, they will definitely need it.

So, what now? Some of the volunteers and I have started to plan an academic paper on our experiences; which we hopefully can publish in an international development journal to facilitate some rich discussions. And... I'm off to Ethiopia. Before I accepted the post with Manna Project International, I had passed all the rounds of interviews to volunteer with Voluntary Services Overseas. However, I decided to go with MPI as VSO were not currently doing programmes in Latin America. I got back in touch with VSO and asked if they had any opportunities shorter-term. So, I will be volunteering in Ethiopia for 3-4 months in a UNICEF funded project with a team of participatory action researchers in refugee camps throughout Ethiopia. The plan was for me to fly to Ethiopia on the 30th of December but getting back to the UK during the Christmas period has slowed everything down so I'm still trying to get various things and VSO has to clear them before I go. It is likely I will be in Ethiopia by the second week in January.

I'm very excited to go to Ethiopia; but I was very sad to leave Ecuador. I honestly adore Ecuador and would recommend everyone and anyone to go. The people. the food, the landscape... I made some real friendships there and I know that some of them will last a long, long time. I will definitely be back in Ecuador. It was an absolute pleasure.

Ecuador, Manna Project International and learning new ways of being...

I arrived in Ecuador just over a week ago (10:20pm on the 5th of August, to be exact). I don't think I've ever squeezed so much into a week. Two of my housemates whom I will be working with at Manna met me at the airport, and we began the taxi ride back to Manna house in Sangolqui. Sangolqui is a suburb located at the south of Quito. I almost passed out when I got there (I had been travelling since 3am that morning - Dallas to Ft Lauderdale, Ft Lauderdale to Atlanta, and Atlanta to Quito). The next day I was straight into work. The Manna 'philosophy' is to get stuck in to work it all out. There was some handover. We had our team meeting which happens every Tuesday. There were five of us at that meeting. The Country Director, the Manna Centro director, a Program Director who had been in post for a year (and was leaving in two days), and two fellows who had started approximately 2-3 weeks before me. From them, I had some idea of what I would be doing for the next year; although it was clear this could change.

It is a true saying you don't really know what a job / volunteer placement is asking from you until you arrive... 'suck it and see' in a way. From my limited time at Manna so far I can see the organisation is in a period of flux and change. Manna began its operations in Nicaragua, and expanded to Guatemala and Ecuador some years later. Its vision is to cultivate young leaders through grassroots community development work; predominantly in the arenas of health, education and livelihoods. Since its inception, it has been heavily volunteer-focused. This is an organisation that US undergraduates and graduates would consider for an internship - both short-term or long-term. This can be for a number of reasons, which include: (i) to improve their Spanish; (ii) to gain experience working in international community development; (iii) voluntourism, i.e. to use volunteering as a means to travel; (iv) to gain experience in health, education or livelihoods; and (v) to do something completely different. Placements at Manna range from 1 week (spring breakers) to 13 months.

Prior to the arrival of the two fellows and myself, the volunteer roles at Manna consisted of Program Directors, Assistant Program Directors and the shorter-term interns. It has now expanded to include a Director for Research and Program(me)s and Fellows. The sites at Guatemala and Nicaragua have also closed due to a variety of reasons. So, Manna is now the Ecuador site only and there is a shared recognition it needs to develop and adapt to changing times.

I see what's happening at Manna fairly representative of wider scale changes in international development. Organisations that have been financially dependent on volunteers have taken quite a hit due to the backlash of voluntourism, and the introduction of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which place a stronger emphasis on bottom-up and holistic development; with sustainable outcomes for the communities involved, not the organisations. This has affected grant and sponsor funding, as well as funding that comes through volunteers. Funders are looking for more evidence that predominantly volunteer-run development organisations are adhering to the SDGs and are putting the needs of communities - rather than volunteers - first. Whilst Manna has always consistently placed the needs of its communities as a core concern, it now needs to make sure that the needs of its volunteers do not overshadow its communities. And volunteers realise they will be able to secure better employment opportunities if they work with an organisation that is recognised as doing 'authentic' community development work.

For me, this is a challenging but ideal context to work in. I've read so much research about this and taught on it, but haven't actually lived through it in practice (it was the Millennium Development Goals when I was last a practitioner). So, my role is helping the organisation to complete its transformation. This is through monitoring, evaluation, training and expansion. All things I am happy to undertake.

There will be a lot of work involved. My days are long and I have to use any extended time I have to explore Ecuador. Which I have been doing. It was a national holiday weekend last week so I went to Tena and Misahualli to explore the Amazonian jungle. It was spectacular. The drive there was even more spectacular. Ecuador is a very beautiful country. It is much greener than I ever expected. Once you get outside Quito, it is just emerald loveliness. I am very lucky to be here. To begin a new chapter of my life surrounded by such loveliness, opportunities and people. It is a real privilege to become acquainted with South America and my impressions so far of Ecuadorean people have impressed me. The local children and volunteers are a breath of fresh air, and the community so kind and welcoming. It really is a pleasure to be here. But, it will be hard work. 12 months will tell if it has been worth it...