Monday 7 February 2011

7th February 2011

The next hurdle in our preparations is communication. In order to get the most out of our time in ethiopia, we really need to be able to speak the language. Aahhh, but which one do we choose? The villagers living in the area of Oromo speak Oromifa and the majority of hospital workers speak Amharic. I think that many of the nurses and doctors also speak some English, although I'm not sure how fluently. There are around 77 different languages spoken in Ethiopia, so I guess we're lucky to have to choose between just two. Ideally, we should speak both Oromifa and Amharic but let's not get too carried away.

On the basis that we want to ideally communicate with the 'locals', we've decided to learn Oromifa. This may sound easy enough but we have been confronted with the fact that there appears to be very little written Oromifa around. Many hours of trawling on the net made me conclude that a visit to the School of African Studies is necessary. It may also be possible to pick up a dictionary from the area when we have our brief visit soon. So far, I've learnt around 100 words but have no idea how to string them together.

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