8 March. Monday. Marlene and I have an appointment to see a local school today, but it is not until 2:30pm, and so she will write this morning and I will take one last opportunity to get back up the mountains. Today Destow and I hike alone because Chloe and Alex have returned to Addis. We leave before 7:00am because the plan is for a 32km round-trip to a remote rock-hewn church at over 3400 meters. We’ll need to climb well over 700 meters on the 16 km path out. We have only seven hours, and so Destow sets a relentless pace that leaves me gasping on the steeper slopes.

View from a mountain path near Lalibela

He is well able to do this, for he spent two years running 20km — each way — to high school. A marathon five days a week. He tells me it took him about five hours a day to make the journey — three hours out and two hours back. The way there, he says by way of explanation, was mostly uphill. Destow’s family home is in the country on the flats well below Lalibela. Until grade three he was able to attend a local school. Thereafter he ran 7km to the junior school every day. And back. When he elected to go on with his education past grade nine he had no option but to run to the nearest high school 20km away.

Before 8:00am we pass through a town about two km beyond Lalibela. We are silently joined there by a young boy who looks to be five or six to me, but who later informs us he is eight. He has to jog to keep up and does so for at least three km going up a steep, rock-strewn path. He proudly carries a set of new plastic shoes and wears another on his feet. Destow tells me the boy lives in the mountain village higher up the path. Apparently he was sent by his family at daybreak to journey on his own 5 or 6 km down to Lalibela to fetch shoes for himself and another member of his family. I think of my own son, only a year older, who would not venture a block away from home on his own.

Our young companion leaves us at the next village and we continue upwards over the shoulder of the mountain. As the trail starts to level out we are met by a robed priest journeying the other way. Destow tells him we have come to visit his church and so he turns to join us, stopping periodically to bless the few people we meet coming down the mountain.

Rock-hewn church in the mountains 16km from Lalibela

The church is remote and impressive–apparently dating to the 12th century. It is hewn from sandstone and so has suffered through time. It is partially collapsed and has been repaired — is now protected by a roof of corrugated iron perched on Eucalyptus scaffolding. The guard’s son is terrified of me and he hides in his father’s robe. I am the first foreigner to this region in months, so Destow tells me. The distance and difficulty of the trail is prohibitive and so the site is not listed in any of the guide books. I am the only person he has guided here.

Once inside, joined by the guard and another local man, the priest commences the usual pattern of bringing out, one by one, a series of outstanding relics and manuscripts. Some, I am told, date to the 6th century. The five of us sit for a magical hour on the floor, pouring over vellum manuscripts, some bound in olive wood, others unbound and stored in leather pouches. The priest reads to us in rhythmic Ge’ez. I observe that a torn page has actually been sewn back together and we all laugh examining the careful repair that is centuries old. There is an early example of what appears to be an index. Destow and I remark upon early patterns of punctuation, space between words, and so on.

Torn pages in this MS have been sewn

It seems the history of technologies for writing and literacy development is somehow encapsulated in this beautiful, ancient nation. Papyrus grows thick on the shores of Lake Tana. In the churches and monasteries incunabula and other early examples of the book on vellum are still consulted and used in services. Scribes write with bamboo styli on scrolls of vellum outside the the churches of Lalibela. Books of every type are in demand–rare and expensive. The cost of publication is high. Perhaps here we have an example of what Graff (e.g., The Labyrinths of Literacy) would call a “newly literate” population. And yet, mass literacy remains a goal, not a reality. The “education for all” initiative (free education to grade three) is, after all, in its infancy (see, for example, this article).

Writing on a vellum roll with a bamboo stylus

We take an alternate route back through a narrow valley that is home to many villages. Here I see four rural schools: two for aspiring priests and two public. Destow tells me that aspiring priests, all male, start at six or seven and are schooled in Ge’ez, the formalities of the Ethiopian Christian Orthodox service, and the scriptures. They are not exposed to curriculum beyond this and so are leaders in the community with a very focused perspective. Today they are learning outside–chanting in clearings near the path. Of the public schools I see, one is a makeshift shelter with no walls roofed with a tarp. The other has walls of tarp and one or two additional buildings of mud and straw. None of these schools have power or running water because such amenities, if they are available at all, are not found beyond the immediate town site. Lalibela has no serviced suburbs, and its mostly unpaved roads are primarily populated with donkeys, mules, and pedestrians.

Men barter over a mule. The price will be around 3000 Birr.

Those without donkeys, mules, or horses bear their own loads, as does this child as she makes her way along the shoulder of the main paved road into the town of Lalibela.

I will write of our visit to the Lalibela school in the next post.

7 March. Sunday. Lalibela is high and surrounded by spectacular arid mountains that are sparsely covered with grasses, brush, and the occasional grove of trees or bamboo (the latter only in protected locations near water sources). The town itself sits at over 2, 500 meters and the surrounding mountains range upwards of 3500 meters. Today I joined a UNESCO worker and a Berkely PhD student (Chloe and Alex), both based in Paris, to hike to 3, 200 meters (about 25km round trip). We will see a mountain village (Asheton), rock-hewn church, and monastery.

We started at 7:20 am to beat the heat of the day. The going was tough: the switch-backing trail was uneven, often very steep and rutted, and strewn with loose rocks. At the outset it was also busy with people (all locals except for the three of us) and livestock. Often we waited for those with heavy loads to negotiate steep sections. Falling would result in a dangerous, long tumble. At one point everyone was forced to scrambled aside when two men dropped the long, heavy Eucalyptus pole they were carrying between them. They shouted a warning in Amharic and the log careened down the steep slope, crossing the switch-backs and nearly missing children and those with heavy loads who couldn’t raise their heads to see it coming and get safely to the side. The notion of hiking for the sake of hiking is certainly odd in this place where walking such a mountain trail is done with purpose: getting one’s goods down to market, getting to school or church, etc.

The village was quiet on this Sunday as we passed through at 8:30am, its inhabitants have long since departed for the fields or town. Beyond it the trail was quiet and at times exposed, cut into the side of the cliff face with a long drop to terraced fields below. Most remarkable about this area is the way in which every possible patch of arable land is put to use. Terraces are carved into the most unlikely, steep faces. It is the dry season, and there is nothing growing here now, but in June, July and August, our guide Destow remarked, this area is green and fertile.

We are the only foreigners at the rock-hewn church. It is partially collapsed and, like some of its counterparts in Lalibela, is sheltered by a protective covering meant to keep the rains off the sandstone. Nonetheless, it is impressive, both in its architecture and its stunning location, perched as it is on a jutting rock over the valley, with a sheer drop of several hundred feet on three sides. One is wise to stay back from the precipice.

The monastery, to which we carry on, is some four kilometres down a steep path on the other side of the mountain, nested in a natural cave that is home to hundreds of birds that serenade visitors resting in the chanting room. All of these places are home to relics – remarkable manuscripts of vellum in Ge’ez and old crosses, mostly — which the priests willingly bring out for the perusal of visitors. The manuscripts are particularly stunning, although I often find myself wondering about their preservation — and then, catching myself, about whether preservation is an appropriate concern in this context. How does one balance matters of preservation with the fact that these artefacts are central to the daily goings-on of active places of worship at the heart of these mountain communities? When our guides speak of the unnatural nature of the large, modern coverings UNESCO erected over the rock-hewn churches in the Lalibela town site last year, it is clear that this debate over preservation at the expense of the local culture is ongoing within the community.

6 March. Sadly, Jeff left us today to return via Addis and Germany to Vancouver. It is the weekend, and Marlene and I will take two days break given that the universities are closed and we do not wish to impose on our colleagues during their days off.

We elected to fly to Lalibela to see the rock-hewn churches for which this city is famous. The airports in the north are small and not busy. Empty air strips are backdropped by arid, stepped mountains somewhat reminiscent of the US southwest in the Four Corners and Grand Canyon areas. Ethiopia is high plateau, and in the north the cities are typically situated at over 2400 meters. Some visitors remark that they are affected by the altitude even as they negotiate short distances in the slightly undulating terrain within the towns. Locals of all ages, meantime, carry heavy loads of coal, wood, grain, water, etc, to and from market, often from their residences high in the mountains. Here walking is the primary mode of transportation. Those wealthy enough to own a donkey or few to assist with load bearing are lucky.

Salt for sale at the Lalibela Saturday market

In the late morning we traversed the market, observing bartering over grains, coffee, honey, livestock, etc. USA foreign aid canisters were frequent means of measurement, although often measurement takes the simple form of estimating the weight of product in one’s palm.

There are 11 medieval monolithic rock-hewn churches dating to the 13th century in Lalibela. We toured approximately half of these, which you may read about here, today. These are still active churches, and so in the first we were welcomed to observe part of a service–a remarkable event.

5 March. This morning we were somewhat pressed for time. Jeff must connect with a flight to Vancouver from Addis tomorrow. His flight goes from Gondar, not Bahir Dar, and so we must travel overland to Gondar, an distance of 180km that we hope to make in 3 or 4 hours if the roads are good.

Our driver will pick us up by 9:30 am, and so Marlene had time only for a telephone meeting with Ato Tesfaye Telehun. He and his colleagues had reviewed our proposal in respect to potential collaborations. Ato Tesfaye was very satisfied with the direction of the project (schooling in multilingual settings and mixed-mode approaches to instruction in graduate and teacher education). He reiterated his interest in mixed-mode education as a first step in capacity building for online distance education. Although the infrastructure is not adequate to support online education as of yet, evidently it will develop at some point, and mixed-mode delivery via the LAN will be a first step in preparing for that eventuality. (In the proposal Jeff and I offered UBC as a model of how mixed-mode, distance, and online education are interrelated, and how development in one area builds capacity in the others.)

The trip to Gondar was fascinating, offering a view of the activities of the vast majority of people in this beautiful country: farming. As this article indicates, “agriculture in Ethiopia is the foundation of the country’s economy, accounting for half of gross domestic product (GDP), 83.9% of exports, and 80% of total employment.” To even begin to understand the Ethiopian context, one must make a point of getting out of the cities. I shall return to this notion in the next posts.

Gondar itself is a place of immense historical import. We had a few hours before dark after our drive during which we visited Fasilides’ Castle, Fasilides’ Bath, and Debre Birhan Selassie Church. These are utterly remarkable monuments in a magical setting. During this Lenten time in the Orthodox Christian calendar, the city rang out with the prayers from 44 or more churches. At dusk we sat atop a hill on the edge of the city, hundreds of birds riding the evening thermals above us in a sky painted brilliantly by the last rays of the sun. We were mesmerized by this city’s accoustic and visual beauty.

4 March. Marlene offers the following report, through which I’ve interspersed some additional observations:

Today we met first with the Head Librarian of Bihar Dar University, Getachre Setotaw to follow up his offer to learn about the library system and services. There was no power on campus due to a scheduled 9-hour outage, and many students and faculty were therefore strolling the campus grounds.

Ato Gertahchew toured us through the post-graduate library, the main library, and the business library. Knowing our interest in digital technologies, he remarked upon the library’s planned digitalization project of the print journal collection, acquisitions and cataloging projects using the open software, Greenstone, and showed us the computer labs (there were two with about 10 computers each). The library is beginning to digitize all masters and PhD theses and many are already available on the library website. Both AAU and BDU have worked to digitize their library catalogues. BDU still uses the Dewey Decimal system while Addis Ababa University has converted to Library of Congress with the except of its Amharic collection. Both retain card catalogues for days such as this, when power is down. (And it should be noted that such days are the rule rather than the exception. At this time Ethiopia is facing serious challenges due to the collapse of a main water tunnel in the primary hydroelectric project. Power was down every day during our visit, often several times a day, for periods ranging from 10 minutes to several hours.)

We were then escorted to the Department of English Language Education and met by Dr. Abiy Yegzaw and Ato Zelalem Gefnef, a brilliant and enthusiastic academic who lectures in the department and recently completed a master’s degree in multiculturalism at Addis Ababa University. Other faculty later joined the discussion, Ato Tesfaye Tilahun, Head of Department, Dr. Mulugeta Teka, Ato Dawit Amogne, and Ato Yinager Teklesillaise (both lecturers). The conversation evolved as faculty members joined us over the course of an hour. Our discussions about education in multilingual contexts from the day before were taken up with great interest and we explored the commonalities between Canadian and Ethiopian schooling and teacher education in this area. In Ethiopia, for example, Canada is well known for its bilingual policies in education, and particularly for the French immersion program. What is less known is the extent of multilingualism and the constituent groups of that population (First Nations, immigrants, migrants, refugees). Our Ethiopian colleagues had no idea, for instance, that there are dozens of indigenous languages in Canada apart from the languages of immigrant groups, and they were unaware of language preservation projects that parallel some of their own initiatives. We were keen to learn of each other’s initiatives in this regard.

Our colleagues at BDU spoke of the growing awareness of the rights of children from all language groups in Ethiopia (approximately 80) to learn in their first language. They explained the complexity of this issue: it is important to preserve language and culture, and yet it is also important to give children access to the language of commerce, which is English. They emphasized that research in this area is greatly needed, but is as yet in its infancy.

Ultimately, Ato Tesfaye Telihun reiterated BDU’s desire to consider how a strong program addressing some of the above issues might be developed employing mixed-mode instructional approaches. We drafted a document toward this end, which our colleagues will revise and expand in the next days.

3 March. Bahir Dar University is much smaller than AAU, with 16,000 students on campus and 16,000 in distance education programs. Although the second-biggest city in Ethiopia, this municipality feels much more rural. There are bicycles on the streets — something that would not be possible in Addis because of traffic — and a good deal of agriculture near the university. As at AAU, the setting is multilingual. Internet is in high demand but not easily accessible, and computer access is also limited. Steve Mwiti (ICT) suggested that it would be an overestimation to say that 3-5 percent of students have laptops.

Among the individuals in attendance at this meeting were Tesfeye Dagnew (Coodinator of External Relations), Getachew Setotaw (Bahir Dar University Librarian), and Steve Mwiti (ICT). We were also joined later in the meeting by the Director of Distance Education. The goal of the meeting was to brainstorm possible parallel research projects that might be carried out at BDU and UBC. We had earlier established that supporting learning in multilingual settings and supporting learning or research employing digital technologies might be possible areas of mutual interest and so we moved forward from that point.
By the end of the meeting we had explored four possible areas of research: 1) online distance education; 2) mixed-mode education; 3) supporting learning in multilingual settings; 4) online research dissemination / Digital Journal Archives. Because the infrastructure to support online distance education has yet to be implemented in the region that BDU serves (and anywhere in Ethiopia, for that matter), and considering our subject-area interests, we eventually concluded that mixed-mode education in an on-campus graduate course on English language learning might be a feasible starting point. We are gathering our thoughts on that matter and will discuss possibilities further tomorrow.

2 March. March 2nd is a holiday in Ethiopia and so campus was closed. Dean Tirussew therefore met with us in our hotel, bringing along his 9 year old son, who had taken a number of pictures with one of the digital cameras and had also prepared a short introduction of himself employing the video mode of the camera. One of his thirteen year old cousins had also taken some pictures, and so our first task was to upload the images both boys had taken on a computer for viewing.

The thirteen year old boy, who had a very good eye for composition, took photos of objects around his home such as his desk, a toy placed in a number of different locations, and so on. Dean Tirussew’s similarly took a number of photos of objects around his home: the family computer, awards won by his father, a small traditional coal burner used for making coffee in Ethiopia, and so on. Both children took pictures of only one person: in each case it was an elderly woman (the housekeeper and grandmother respectively).

Having facilitated this short trial with the cameras, Dean Tirussew was enthusiastic about the possibilities of the method for both research and teacher education. He remarked that Ethiopia is a complex setting for formal education because there are multiple religions, tribal backgrounds, and languages. Therefore, children in the same classroom may have highly disparate home contexts. For example, government schools are attended by both Christian and Muslim children; further, while Amharic is the language of instruction in primary schools, it is not spoken by all of the population, so that some children come to school not knowing the language of instruction. Beyond the affordances of digital photography as a research method for offering insight into the home and school literacy practices of children, therefore, Dean Tirussew was also interested in the possibilities of digital photography as a method for enabling children in school to understand each others’ home contexts, as well as for instructors to understand their students’ home contexts. He remarked, as well, that there are initiatives underway in Ethiopia toward education for good parenting, and that this method of data collection may be beneficial in forwarding this project as well in terms of providing visual examples of the sorts of settings in which children are raised, etc.
We noted that students similarly come from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds in British Columbia and that we shared many of the same concerns and research interests in this regard. So it would appear the next step is to draft a research proposal, which is something we will work toward in the next days. At the end of the day we flew up to Bahir Dar for meetings at Bahir Dar University (BDU) on 3 March.

There have been some problems with Internet access at the Ghion Hotel the last days, and so I’m posting two entries today: the entry below delineates our ECERC activities on 28 February, and this one delineates our activities March 1.

Ethiopia is 13 hours ahead of Vancouver, and so as we began our day’s meetings at Addis Ababa University, Vancouver was apparently celebrating a successful last day or two of the Olympics. Contemplating that celebration and the Games in light of our current context is troubling. One wonders if it might ever be possible to arrive at a more equitable model of global resource distribution. Here the Olympics haven’t registered at all, of course.

We met with Dean Tirussew, Hailu Gutema (Practicum Coordinator), and Temtim Assefa (ICT Education) in the AAU Faculty of Education at 9:00 am and had a discussion about possible collaborations, ending with the understanding that we will work in the next days toward drafting a research proposal in relation to the digital camera project. We then toured the AAU John Kennedy Library and three computer laboratories, one for graduate students and two for students with disabilities. The former contained perhaps 30 computers and the latter contained approximately 10 computers each — mostly desktop Dell models that appeared to be four to seven years old. All were networked and loaded with Jaws software for individuals with visual impairment. The initiatives at AAU to integrate this segment of the student body are impressive.
Compared to Canada, a much higher portion of the population here is visually or hearing impaired. As well, there are many amputees and individuals with other challenges to mobility caused by diseases such as polio, which is still a major problem in Ethiopia. Raising public awareness about the needs of individuals who are challenged in such ways, as well as the needs of other disenfranchised groups, appears to be a key initiative at present. For example, outside the John Kennedy Library a poignant sign reads, “Disability is a reality for me but a possibility for everyone.” Around the city, as well, are many large billboards speaking to the importance of supporting people with various physical and emotional challenges, and also to the importance of education for all. Beyond these, there are many billboards advocating for women’s and children’s rights. According to two NGO workers with whom we had dinner later in the day, these posters and billboards are a fairly recent initiative, having started to appear within the last two years or so. Many are in English only, though, which makes one ponder the intended audience.

Following our very productive meetings at AAU, Hailu and Temtim took us to the oldest school in Ethiopia, Menelik II Secondary School. The principle was very accommodating and spent a good portion of the afternoon with us. We toured three computer laboratories and spoke to students in grades 11 and 12. One of the classes was just being introduced to Microsoft Word, a second was working with Excel, and a third was learning about Internet Explorer. The last class was particularly intriguing because the students were learning about the web browser without access to the Internet. (Sixteen networked computers are housed in a building away from the school, but the impression we were given is that they are not used for class instruction.) The instructor indicated that the day’s lesson on Internet Explorer was about directory structure.

In the more advanced class working on Excel, I sat amongst three girls sharing one computer and creating a spreadsheet. The one who had the keyboard was particularly adept, and I inquired of her as to whether she had a computer at home. She indicated with a broad smile that she did. Having computer access at home is highly unusual for students at government (public) schools. These schools are poorly resourced and have large class sizes (figures that have been reported to us on this trip range from fifty to eighty). Menelik II is one of the best and most sought after government schools, with three computer laboratories for classrooms and an additional lab for Internet access. Nevertheless, it has a very small book collection, particularly for a school with over 2500 students, and the class sizes are large.

The final class we visited was an English as a second language class learning about passive voice. What was remarkable about this class was the number of students who were hearing impaired (at least five of perhaps fifty in the class). As in the other classes, students numbered several to a desk and sat pressed against each other. The principle pointed out that a “plasma teacher” — a television to accommodate broadcast lessons — was installed in this room. Hailu had indicated earlier that this program is problematic in part because it is a South African initiative and therefore Ethiopian students struggle with the accented English used in the broadcasts. As well, there is some concern that it is a poor attempt to replace teachers. Possibly thinking of such criticisms, the principal emphasized that he views this as a supplemental program not intended in any way to replace teachers.

After speaking with the students for a few minutes we toured the grounds of the adjacent elementary school and observed a physical education class taught by a dynamic teacher who lead the students through callisthenics. Interacting with the bright and keen students in Menelik II was the highlight of our day.
In the evening we were fortunate to join a couple who had been involved in aid work and had lived in Haiti, Rwanda, and Ethiopia for about thirty years, the last ten in Ethiopia, where they moved when Rwanda finally became too dangerous in 1991. Murial is a teacher librarian at a local private school and Tim is a physician working in Aids awareness and prevention. We were also joined by John, who works alongside Murial in teacher librarianship and who spoke extensively of his efforts to build constructivist learning environments in a setting where didactic methods of delivery are almost universal due to constraints such as class size, etc.

Shirley Lewis generously invited us to tea yesterday (Sunday, February 28) in order to continue discussions about library projects, etc, at the Addis home wherein she presently rents a room. This is a lovely old mud and plaster home with wooden floors, the walls of which are covered with stunning Ethiopian art collected by one of the other renters who in a dealer of Ethiopian art.

Knowing that one of our hopes here is to foster research connections between students at Addis Ababa University and the University of British Columbia, Shirley arranged for us to meet Anegagegn Gashaw, an AAU PhD student whose research project is titled “Ethiopian Learners’ Familiarity with the English Sound System and the Intelligibility of their Non-native Speech.” Anegagegn joined us for tea, spoke of his research, and asked us to participate in a pilot of his research. This was an intriguing glimpse into the way in which digital technologies are being used here to facilitate research. Anegagegn had us listen to 31 spoken sentence fragments spoken by Ethiopian learners of English. These he had digitally recorded on his laptop using the open source sound editor, Power Sound. (He indicated that he had also trialed Audacity, another open source sound editor, before settling on Power Sound as the application he found more intuitive.) After each fragment, he asked us to write down our perception of what had been said and then to rate the difficulty of intelligibility of the speaker and the degree of foreign speaker accent. Subsequently, he digitally recorded each of us reading a passage containing several of the phrases we had earlier heard the English learners speak. His goal is to examine how the pronunciation of native speakers of English from various parts of the world differs from that of Ethiopian learners of English by comparative analysis of the recordings of native speakers and English learners. The digital sound editor will allow him to isolate and compare phonetic units very easily, a unique affordance of the technology. Hearing of Aneg’s work and participating in his study made us eager to hear more of education research initiatives at AAU in the coming days.

It is 4:30am in Addis, and I am listening to the prayers broadcast across the city as I write. We have been here for less than three days, and yet it seems much longer because we have been very busy. Yesterday we began with a meeting with Dean Tirussew Kidanmariam Tefarra of the Faculty of Education at Addis Ababa University (AAU). We spoke of the main purpose of our visit: possibilities for parallel research projects at AAU and UBC that might allow for scholarly exchange among faculty and students at both institutions. We presented one possible methodological approach for an initial project: a form of pictorial ethnography whereby learners use digital cameras to document their formal and informal learning settings and have conversations with researchers about the significance of the images they have captured. Especially among young children and in multilingual settings where language may be a barrier, this has proved a useful method for garnering understanding as to how children perceive, and what they find important within, their learning environments. (I’ll add references to this post when I have better connectivity.) Dean Tirussew was keen on this project, particularly pointing out the benefits of such a project for teacher education, and anticipated that a number of graduate students at AAU might be interested in such work. We hope to arrange a meeting with such students when we return from Bahir Dar. At the close of the meeting we provided two digital cameras for use by AAU graduate students or faculty who wish to carry out research employing this method. When the AAU researchers have identified research settings, we will invite interested graduate students at UBC to carry out similar research in a parallel setting in British Columbia and set up a means of digital communication between sites. The collective data will provide a catalyst for conversations among researchers at both sites, for mentorship of students, for furthering of understanding of literacy practices in diverse contexts, and for building of research capacity at AAU, all key goals of ECERC.

Following our meeting we rejoined Shirley Lewis (see yesterday’s post) at AAU to walk through a book fair and meet with key players in the Ethiopian publishing industry. We looked at collections of books for children in Amharic and discussed incentives that have been put in place to encourage the writing of children’s books in Amharic (e.g., writing prizes). Here the main language of instruction up to grade six is Amharic (thereafter it is English), and therefore it is important that a corpus of context-specific early literacy books in Amharic is established and made available widely. Ideally, libraries would be filled with such books rather than early literacy books in English that have been donated from abroad. (This is not to say that such donations are not important; it is merely that such donated volumes frequently depict foreign youth undertaking activities and dealing with issues that are far removed from the local context, which evidently has implications for reader reception in Ethiopia.)

The local publishing industry is fledgling, however, and while there is great demand for Amheric books it is hard for publishers to make a profit in part because of the expense of paper and other production costs, and in part because those who most need the books are not in a position to pay for them. The option of open access digital distribution (via online or offline means) would seem an important strategy to pursue, and both Jeff and I have been keen to discuss the possibilities, and yet those in the publishing industry and those working to establish libraries and reading rooms understandably remain sceptical. When I raised the possibilities with Shirley Lewis, citing an example of a joint digital library initiative of School District 62 in Victoria, BC and the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory at the University of Victoria, she expressed interest and spoke of a disk she purchased for 10 Birr containing 4000 texts in the public domain harvested from sites such as Project Gutenberg. This is an ideal resource for sites with computers and without connectivity, and she stated that her Ethiopian librarian contacts invariably want copies if she has them on hand. And yet, how might distribution in this form be balanced with the needs of the fledgling local publishing industry? And to what extent do the costs of hardware and maintenance — even if connectivity is not required — outweigh the benefits?

Alemseged, the school library program director with Ethiopia Reads, spoke candidly of such problems later in the day when we visited the Shola Children’s Library, likely the best-stocked public library for children in Addis and a safe oasis from the bustle of the streets with a modest collection of a few thousand donated English volumes as w ell as some newer volumes in Amharic. It was filled with children on the Saturday we visited, who read at desks in the building (a converted home), and in a grassed courtyard overhung with a large Hibiscus tree brimming with brilliant fuchsia blossoms. The ECBC sponsors a hygine program in the same location so that those who have need may also bathe, have their clothing washed, and get a haircut. There were many children waiting for these services when we visited.

Ethiopia Reads is doing wonderful work — considering the needs of young learners holistically, with understanding that health and safety are necessary precursors of intellectual engagement; and yet the need is far beyond what they are able to provide. As intimated earlier, many of the donated English volumes with which their libraries are stocked are donated from culls of North American libraries (the solitary book on Canada in the ECRC, for example, was published in 1987 and obviously contained much outdated information, which is certainly why it was culled from the California public library from which it hailed). So much of the English collection needs updating, local content, as ever, is essential, and in all of this it is important to explore strategies for making digital resources available in a manner that is sensitive to the local publishing industry. (As to the last, Shirley intimated that a similar difficulty faces the fledgling textile industry: donations of clothing from abroad, while of immediate benefit for the poor, may undermine the work of local clothing factories and in so doing perpetuate the cycle of poverty by putting locals out of work.)

Finally, we visited Sabahar, a local silk factory run by Kathy Marshall, a Canadian whose goal is to provide reliable employment for locals, mostly women. She has imported silk worms from Northern India. Her staff raise the worms, harvest and spin the silk. Dyes are made from local plants and the silk is woven into beautiful scarves on site which she has begun in the last few years to export around the world. It has taken years to build the business, and it barely breaks even; however, Kathy emphasizes that the business is a huge success in that she is now employing 50-60 local workers on an ongoing basis.