Several important events have happened recently; a couple of them we noticed much more than in previous years as we now have a panoramic view of the local area from our new second floor flat. The birds changed – the vultures suddenly vanished (hooray!) and dozens of yellow-billed kites returned, circling and swooping around outside our window. (What do all these big birds of prey eat we wondered? Hopefully the local rat population.)

That heralded the weather changing – on Wednesday the rain stopped, the air cleared, the clouds lifted and the sun came out. It’ll be out for months now (except at night of course) and we won’t see rain until February probably. At roughly the same time trains started running on the light rail system that we have watched slowly develop ever since we’ve been here. It’s an amazing piece of civil engineering - the cost about a quarter that of the Edinburgh tram system whilst being about 4 times the size. There are small concrete lift shafts with no machinery, escalators that don’t work (totally open to the elements so waterproof escalators I presume), rubble all over the place with precious little finishing around the track and stations but at least for a fare of anything between 2 and 8 Birr (6p to 25p) people are at last  travelling.

Starting the trains running was timed to coincide with the festival of Meskel (the finding of the “true” cross – see here for last year’s explanation) which also sees an explosion of yellow flowers all over the countryside caused by the change in the weather. So with this particular public holiday falling on a Monday we had the opportunity to take a long weekend out of Addis to both see friends and (more importantly?) give my quadcopter some air time in locations where it probably wouldn’t be shot down by concerned police. With our Ford Ranger pick-up newly released from bureaucracy hell (I should blog about that sometime…) we packed it up (with both luggage and a jerry can filled with 25 litres of diesel fuel insisted on by Haile who gets very nervous when I drive out of Addis) and we set off down the brand new Addis to Adama “Expressway”. This carves a good half an hour off the journey to Gary and Peggy in Ziway and is a beautiful, open, brand new almost deserted stretch of prime motorway. Except it has the most puzzling and unenforceable set of lane-specific maximum and minimum speed limits and restrictions imaginable. Click here and see if you can work out how to drive down it without breaking the law.

After an overnight stop in Ziway the four of us drove to Soddo Christian Hospital which we had all heard of but never seen. On the way we stopped by a crater lake and practically the entire population of a local village rushed out to see my drone hovering over the water. They’ll be talking about it for months.

Gary and Peggy have a member of staff whose family lives in Shashamane (the centre of the Rastafarian universe) and as it was Meskel we were invited for coffee. We headed over there after a night at Soddo and were entertained in a way only Ethiopians can. Coffee turned into a full meal of course, and the local kids were desperately banging on the compound gate when they saw the quadcopter rising above a big vulture languidly sitting on a telegraph pole.

Our last night was spent in a resort by Hawassa lake which was perhaps a bit over-priced but a great place to relax by the lake reading and, well, yes, flying the ‘copter. It rather spooked out the local security guard (despite getting his permission initially) so it was a short flight.

We dropped Gary and Peggy off in Ziway and spent a short time visiting their 10 orphaned children in “Samuel’s Home”. Ethiopians have a propensity to use Biblical names for their children, but one of the kids living there has a name that he may find it difficult to live up to and that lacks a bit of subtlety – “El Shaddai” (“God Almighty”). Our final drone flight amused the kids immensely and terrified the guard dogs into desperate barking. Back to Addis on Monday evening – 885 km later.

Soddo Christian Hospital was both an uplifting and a sobering experience. Their mission is to provide excellent medical care in a Christian context, and we could see that happening. The new CT scanning equipment has helped enormously. But with 180 or so beds across several wards set in a sizeable bustling town their nurses have to wash and reuse gloves; their sterilising equipment is overloaded; and despite having the equipment they cannot get staff qualified and able to manage a patient on a ventilator. Dr Andrew Chew showed us around, and as we stood chatting outside the ICU a young woman came out of the ward into the corridor behind us, collapsed to her knees, raised her hands to heaven and began calling on the name of Jesus. She prayed. She cried. Her 2 year old son, seriously injured in an accident recently, had just that minute died.

I’d often wondered if the bulls and oxen that are frequently herded on Addis city streets do any harm. I now know they do. Tigist’s aunt was tossed by a bull the other day, sustained a head injury and a brain haemorrhage, needed urgent surgery but died the next day never having regained consciousness. She died in the same bed and on the same ward as her 31 year old daughter did, 11 months ago, of a brain tumour. (See the section “Tigist” in this post).

The day after this as Haile was driving me to the clinic he told me about a close friend of his, 35 years old, who had become unwell the day before and within 24 hours had died. No-one knows why, and with the funeral and burial taking place within 24 hours of the death no-one ever will.

Tragedy is a way of life here.