Workshops in Ethiopia 2018

In June, I had the pleasure of going to Ethiopia to visit a couple of the local universities and help facilitate some workshops for the staff, faculty and students. Our group from Calgary consisted of Guido van Marle (who has gone every year for the past ten or so years), Alya Heirali, James Wasmuth, Stephen Pollo and me, Kaylee Rich. We were also joined during portions of the trip by John Gilleard, Dylan Pillai and his students James and Ruth. It was an amazing experience and we met some wonderful, enthusiastic people.

The first city we visited was Addis Ababa, where our group had the resources and time to split into two separate workshops, Guido and Alya ran a molecular lab-based workshop and James, Stephen and I attempted to teach way too much bioinformatics in way too little time. We may have been over-ambitious, as the topics we addressed ranged from basic BLAST to phylogenic and microbiome analysis, but the attendees were excited to learn the material and were able to keep up. The first day consisted of setting up a Linux virtual machine for each of them and a quick introduction to the Linux command line. Reflecting back on it, this becomes even more impressive on their part because the majority of them did not have any experience with Linux before coming to the workshop.

The entire trip was a learning experience for all of us, but one of the main things I think most of us took away is how much we take for granted every day. Home internet access was one of the things that we didn’t take into consideration when sending out materials before our arrival, like an online introduction course to Linux command line. One or two people were able to access that online course before we arrived, but for the most part everything was new to the majority of participants. Even though there was a steeper learning curve than we anticipated, everyone remained enthusiastic, and even though torrential downpours caused power and internet outages, spirits were not dampened. Personally, this was the first time I had ever taught for an entire day in front of a class of people and I wasn’t (quite) as nervous as I thought I would be! After the 4 full days of intense bioinformatic instruction and troubleshooting I think everyone, instructors and participants alike, were happy we had gotten through it unscathed.

For the second week of our visit, James flew back home while we continued our trip to Jimma. At Jimma University we ran a single three-day workshop that mainly focused on bioinformatics, though it was a simplified version of what we taught in Addis just because we did not have enough time. The class was smaller, but everyone was still very eager to learn. We had to contend with the same power outages experienced in Addis, but this time there was no WiFi available on campus. The lack of internet wasn’t as big of an issue as we thought it might be since we were able to download anything we may have forgotten via hardline in the room next to the class and distribute software by USB. The curriculum also changed slightly since James was not there, we did not set up virtual machines and instead tried to do everything possible using Windows. Guido and Alya taught sections of this workshop as well and did a great job of grounding and expanding on the bioinformatics portions. We quickly found out that even though a program works on one operating system, it doesn’t mean that it’ll work the same way on a different operating system (even if it is supposed to). I had to do some quick troubleshooting and re-writing of my tutorial before teaching during the second day. Luckily, my section was easy to explain via drawing on the whiteboard and we had power through most of it. Stephen, who taught the section right before me, was not as lucky – the power cut out as soon as we got there and did not come back on until right after he had finished his section.

Overall, the people were amazing, the food was delicious, and the coffee was the best I’ve ever had. It was such a good experience and it was a lot of fun getting to meet all the people who attended the workshops. After each of the workshops there were participants who would stop us to ask questions specific to their research interests or to see if we were planning on coming back next year. I had a few people stop to tell me that they enjoyed my section and that they are going to be able to use it in their own research, which made me so happy that I was able to participate and those moments were definitely the best part of the trip.