Blog

Five Things I Learnt in Ethiopia

Having worked as a finance manager at Link Ethiopia for 18 months, I was finally on my way to Ethiopia – from spreadsheets to reality. As a hard bitten traveller (ahem), a putative Masters graduate in Development Management and a Link Ethiopia veteran, you may have expected that I knew what I was letting myself …

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Why do we travel?

[singlepic id=483 w=320 h=240 float=right]I should travel more. I always want to but my timidity drags me back home.  There are goods and bads of travel, before I launch into the good, I want to mention the bad, it’s too easy to skip over them and swoon about how amaaazing a place was when you’re …

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Queniborough Teachers Visit Yekatit 23

We recently blogged about a school link between Queniborough and Yekatit 23. Two teachers from Queniborough, Lindsay Jones and Helen Francis went out to visit their link school. What follows is blog about their trip from their point of view, providing a valuable insight into the benefits of visiting a link school. Yekatit 23 is …

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The Sounds of English

We spent our first week getting to grips with the projects, setting up the monitoring and a fair amount of that time translating, formatting, editing, printing, copying, hole-punching and binding some books to go in our project school libraries. These are very simple books in English and the local language that will allow children to …

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Measuring Success

Before starting any new intervention, we must measure whatever it is we’re trying to change.  Getting this baseline means we know the situation when we started and can see if there’s any improvement later on. After arriving in Gondar, before getting off to any of the schools, monitoring was therefore where we started work.  A …

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Alastair’s Arrival

I’d been to Link Ethiopia’s offices in London to meet their wonderfully enthusiastic and pleasingly easy-going staff twice before setting off for the horn, but really had no idea what to expect from the projects, country or local staff.  Occasionally, ill-formed predictions would swim across my mind, but they were given short shrift; I’ve always …

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Schoolympics!

Nothing brings people together quite like sport, and nothing brings people together from all over the world quite like the Olympic and Paralympic Games. It was in fact the inspiration of the London 2012 games that encouraged Tannery Drift School to seek out links abroad, and through Link Ethiopia, it is now linked with Salem …

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Queniborough Primary School and Yekatit 23 School Link Update

It’s been a successful year of school linking between Queniborough Primary School in Leicestershire and Yekatit 23 School in Bahir Dar. Alongside the usual school linking activities Queniborough and Yekatit 23 have been developing their link through a combination of visits and fundraising. Abundeje Belay arrived on the 27th June for a week-long visit, this …

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Clemy’s Trip of a Lifetime

At the beginning of August, I flew out to Ethiopia as one of fourteen Girl Guides, accompanied by four group leaders. The trip was organised through Girlguiding North East and a few weeks after the selection camp in September last year, I received a letter to say I had been chosen to take part in …

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Together We Learn - Ethiopia