The View From Here

 For the past month we have been worried about students and parents navigating the mud soaked 2km road to the school. Every time we thought we had an opportunity to bring contractors in to repair it, the skies would open and buckets of rain would fall. So, you can imagine our relief when, three days before school was to start, the skies cleared and we moved quickly forward dumping over 120 truck loads of rock and gravel to fill the muddy pools of water on the road. It was all hands on deck as our grounds crew supervised the work from early morning to let in the evening. The grueling work was completed just before the 10:00am arrival time on Sunday, allowing our students and families to drive to the school. We met in the HMA at 8:30 Sunday morning and Maya went over the schedule for the day. Everyone had worked so hard in preparation for welcoming and teaching the students. While we were well prepared, we were all a bit nervous in meeting the kids for the first time It turned out to...

Happy New Year! The Ethiopian calendar divides the year into 13 months, with the last month of the year lasting 5-6 days, depending on whether or not it's leap year. This allows each of the 12 months to have 30 days. So, the last month is a 5 day catch up month for the year. New Year's day for Ethiopia (Enkutatash) falls on last day of the month of Pagume, which is September 11 on the Gregorian calendar. It is celebrated similarly to the way we celebrate in the U.S., only with more of a family and stay at home feel.  Here are two faculty children, Merherbert and Ebabe wearing traditional clothing, which is dominated by the color white. They bring a New Year's welcoming to your door on New Year's day and you're expected to give them a gift of money, which they can keep or donate to a favorite charity. On campus. We celebrated New Year's Eve at the home of one of our Ethiopian teacher's and her family. We drank Tej, which is a local drink, and ate tibs, a cook...

Sunset at HMA after packed week of learning It’s been a busy second week at HMA! In addition to daily lessons in Amharic for the international teachers, we took a good amount of time to discuss Simon Sinek’s belief in the importance of starting our planning by asking the “Why” of our work before we get to the “How” or “What” with our students. We also covered Holidays and how we celebrate them at HMA. Most include some form of fasting, which had gotten a little out of hand with some of the students last year. We reviewed our newly revised Student Handbook, took time to develop our pre-assessment strategies, understand the role of Service Learning, how we deal with religion at a secular school in a very religiously divided country, and learn about Ethiopian traditions. Maya Posey, our Director of Community Life, provided us an overview of how our Gojo, Crew, and Advisory groups would work this year. We wrapped up the week with in depth discussions on the Curriculum Design for each ar...