The Bad

It's rather incongruous sitting here writing this at a time when we have been without water at Bingham for a couple of days - while there is a thunderstorm going on outside and it is bucketing down. I think the rainy season has arrived - it's rained nearly every day for the last week. We've not had the water off for this long since we've been here, and the Bingham emergency tanks are empty. We have a full reserve in our big blue water container in our bathroom, but if the mains water doesn't come back in a couple of days things will begin to get tricky. Another SIM compound in Addis Ababa has been without water for two weeks, and Seble (our house worker) has often had weeks without water. Right now we do have electricity and Internet, but power cuts often happen about now...

The Ugly

In 2007 we met Brian. He was in his twenties and had been here since 2003 and had developed a reputation for being slightly "unusual". He was in Language School when we met him, and he organised a number of things for all the newbies that year including the most entertaining evening ten pin bowling you could imagine and a couple of day trips out. At one time he bought a horse and rode it around the city, parking it at Bingham when he was here. Just before we left in December 2007 the staff organised a "Secret Santa" party. Brian bought a present that he made sure I received - two old, dirty, rough-hewn wooden statues about a foot high of a man and a woman wearing nothing except a necklace (or maybe a scarf?) and otherwise "anatomically correct" in a rather disproportionate way. it made a hilarious end to the evening, but a few days later when we were packing to come home we "forgot" to pack the statues as we didn't feel a place of honour for them on our mantelpiece in St Albans was quite the thing to do. Especially not when hosting a church home group.

Brian is now married, has a couple of small children, and works at the SIM compound way down in the Great Rift Valley next to Langano lake.

I bumped into him this week while spending a few nights at the SIM guesthouse in Addis (where our first visitors from the UK were staying). Brian said he had something for me. He reappeared a short while later with a "Magic Time Corn Flakes" box ("Magic Time" make more than just pseudo-Pringles) in which were - the two statues. He had found them again after we left in 2007 and has kept them all this time anticipating our return when he could reunite me with my present. It would be hard to describe my gratitude. Anyway, here's a picture. Modesty prevents me showing you them in their entirety.

Somewhat bizarrely there is a very much bigger version of the female statue in the National Museum in Addis Ababa (the museum that proudly houses the skeleton of the 3.2 million year old hominid "Lucy"). I wonder if I am unwittingly in possession of an important Ethiopian artifact?

If you have a good imaginative idea as to what I should do with these statues, please add a comment to this post. At the moment they may find their way back into a "Secret Santa" next Christmas...

The Good

Question: How long does it take to enter the password to unlock a Windows 8 tablet? Answer - half the height of the Blue Nile gorge. As we were climbing up out of this astonishingly eye-popping gorge Chris had to find some more music on my tablet (which was plugged into the vehicle CD player) and the road surface was so rough, buckled and bumpy that entering the password became a major task.

It takes an hour to cross the Blue Nile gorge on the way to and from Bahir Dar - one hour of a ten hour drive.The entire distance feels like one long road across Dartmoor - unfenced, and at any time an animal might jump out in front of you. Except here it isn't Dartmoor ponies - it could be any or all of bulls, cows, horses, sheep, goats, dogs, cats, donkeys, people, horse-drawn carts etc. Then there are potholes. Despite what you think, you have no idea what a pothole is until you've been somewhere like this. I doubt I went more than two minutes for the entire 10 hour drive without having to cope with some sort of hazard.

it was worth it though. we needed a break and Bahir Dar was ideal. We went to the source of the Blue Nile on lake Tana and saw some hippos, and we were driven through an extraordinarily rural subsistence-farmed landscape to get to see the Blue Nile Falls which had very little water flowing. We will return some time after the rainy season when they are full and rival the Victoria Falls for magnificence.

So we had a lovely time and nothing particularly unusual, funny or entertaining happened that I could put in a blog. Unless you include seven unexplainable insect bites on my bottom. Having the itchiest bottom in the universe is definitely not funny or entertaining. Absolutely not.

Our First Visitors

We have just had a fantastic three days with my sister Lizzy, her husband Steve and daughter Kareema who stopped off to see us on their way to Zimbabwe as part of their support for the Mudeka Foundation. We toured Addis, they had a coffee ceremony with Seble, we went on a country walk and had injera and wat in a traditional restaurant. The goodies, medical equipment supplies and school materials they brought were just great.

Finally

Chris has just reminded me that in Bahir Dar there is a restaurant called "Starbacks Coffee and restaurant". here's a picture of the sign: