A week of truckin’...

This last week I was on site visit. I was placed in the Illubabor region within Oromia; my hub town,which is the main city in my Area is Metu. It is truly a beautiful piece of country. My permanent site is atop a mountain in the Yayo Forrest which is a UNESCO site. I was shocked at how beautiful the land was the first time I got up there.

There is only one other volunteer in my area and he’s in my Group, I feel super lucky to have him near me because he’s only a couple towns over. However there are 8 of us from Group 21 in the region. My town is a Warreda town which means there are government offices in the town for the Ethiopian equivalent of a county. Therefore my town is fairly large all things considered. I can buy most things I need within my town but Metu is only a relatively quick ride away (about 2 hours). My school is great too and my fellow teachers are very open to having me in their school and apart of their staff. I also met my director who is just the nicest guy and has helped me a lot with getting my house set up.

The education bureau for my country is also in my town and thus I met a lot of the government officials. My Warreda chairman is a great guy, and speaks very good English which is nice and seems very excited to have me working for him.

There’s a lot I could say about my town but I was only there for a couple of hours. This whole week has been a week of travel. My region is the most remote out of all of them and requires two 8 hour bus rides (with the exception of Tigray which is only reachable by plane). We left Addis Ababa on Monday at 4:30 and arrived at a mid point which was a city called Jimma. There are a lot of volunteers in Jimma and myself, along with others traveling with me, went out to dinner with them. Then, at 5am the next morning we traveled once more to Metu and arrived at our hotel at 3 on Tuesday. We also all purchased stoves and beds and a couple of things to bring to our house. Metu is truly a nice city, everything is more or less reasonably priced and there isn’t nearly as much harassment as other places in Ethiopia.

On Wednesday, myself and my friend who is in my county traveled to our sites and what a trip it was. We were crammed in the back of a bus driving up a mountain (the slope was basically a black diamond the whole way up for you mountain enthusiasts). First we went to mine and ate, checked out my house and a few other things. Then we went to his site which was a 20 minute drive. Along the way, we made friendly with the health center driver who was bringing us to the other site and we learned that he was headed to Metu after he brought us back to the Warreda town (my site). So we ended up hitching a ride with him and got a free ride back to Metu.

All of my cohort who are in Ilubabor had to return to Metu on Thursday to catch a bus today thatwe are currently on traveling back to Jimma to now fly back to Addis which will be a huge relief because we avoid a second 8 hour drive.

What a week it’s been but I’m stoked to get back and start teaching.

This was a doozy and if you made it this far, thanks for reading.

Ciao!

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