Our New Volunteer has Arrived!!!!

The latest in Nazareth is that our latest volunteer – Emma Le Vine has now safely arrived. Having had experience of living in China and Poland she should be fine with the rigours and relative isolation of Nazareth. The main difficulty for her however is the lack of maid at the moment. We used to have a very good maid however she got married and now appears to be negatively influenced by her husband and decided to stop work. The next maid only lasted a short while and there has been nobody to help Azeb ( Dawits mother ) for a few months now – which was fine since there were no volunteers so she only had herself to sort out.

Using a kerosene stove is not an easy feat – it requires a certain amount of bravery to get the thing on without burning your fingers and skill to throw water on it at a certain angle so that the flames are extinguished but the string wicks aren’t so dampened with water that they won’t relight when necessary ! Still, I’m sure that she’ll get the hang of it !!!

With the end of term looming in about 5 – 6 weeks we are now thinking about graduation and are starting to make the tapes and prepare costumes so that we can finish the year with a bang !It is a very stressful time at the moment however – graduation, end of year examinations and report cards , preparation for the summer school and getting ready for the next academic year ! – Still the great thing is that Emma is now with us so can be a real help!

English Alive Academy named BEST school in Nazareth!!

If you are a regular reader of the blog then you may have been most disappointed for the last couple of months to find nothing new ! I do apologise for this but suddenly got really sick, had an operation and then have had constant infections for the last couple of months ! The good news is that I am slowly getting better so the blog is back !

In Nazareth all is going well – the one set of traffic lights are no longer working ( much to the disappointment of many people who loved to sit and watch them at work ) – one set have been knocked down ( by a big lorry I would imagine ) and as far as anyone knows then they aren’t going to bother to fix them again since they were too confusing!

At the moment we are busy searching for schools to send our current grade four students to next year. We cant afford to hire another building so that we can go up to grade five so these students will be our first ever leavers ! We have been approached by a school in the town who have little idea about education and would like us to work with them as their sister school. The other advantage to this is that they would employ us ( me and my husband Dawit ) so we would have a bit more income ( always necessary ! )

We were inspected by the authorities a few weeks ago and are now officially declared the best school in Nazareth – we are trying to get this in writing so that we can persuade the authorities to give us some free land so that we can eventually build our school ! – We have been trying for years without success – however, you never know !!

The good news is that our latest volunteer – Emma Le Vine – is coming on Wednesday – she initially was booked for a few weeks ago but her father fell sick so it was delayed. It will be great to have a volunteer again as we have had a gap of about four months – which is really too long a gap !