Zumra Nuru, our founder, used to say: “If the ideas are written down, they may prohibit the next generations to take on new technological developments because, they may be tied by the written ideas.”d
Despite Zumra’s belief, many visitors insisted by saying his ideas are unique and that should be transmitted to anyone in the world as they could be of great educational and philosophical value to others.
Zumra was convinced by this and agreed to let his ideas be written down. As a result, a large number of students, researchers and scientists from different universities in Ethiopia and from abroad wrote about our community for their BA, MA and PhD studies.
However due to cultural differences and language barriers some of our ideas were distorted. Therefore, people who read about us sometimes encounter misunderstanding about our community.
Telling our own story in first voice
To solve this problem some of our visitors suggested that the story of the Awra Amba community should be written by the members of the community themselves. We agree and you find the results in this new website as well as in this book and in this video.
However, if it is true that writing our own story edcan minimize the distortion of the truth, it is very difficult to eliminate such distortion totally; especially it results from language barriers.
For example, it is sometimes difficult to translate an idea conveyed in Amharic language into English, so that it conveys exactly the same meaning. Therefore, we trie to translate such words with terms that we think have a closer meaning. Then, if any, the distortion may be a result of grammatical errors: e have tried our best to minimize distortion by consulting English speaker foreigners.
