A good friend told me once that in the course of a language lesson he had asked his tutor how to say “traffic lane” in Amharic. His tutor just looked confused - the concept was lost on her. On some main roads you may find white lines, but as you observe traffic using the line as a guide to drive on (as opposed to between) or more usually ignoring the lines altogether, you realise the concept is lost on most drivers as well.

The light rail construction in Addis is nearing completion and trains are now a regular sight. I frequently go past several stations and elevated parts of the railway underneath which all sorts of things regularly happen. Impromptu shelters for the homeless; groups sitting playing cards; on Saturday as I drove back from the Korean Hospital medical school I was held up by people running across a busy road to get to a spontaneous banana market that had sprung up from nowhere with numerous people selling bananas from wheelbarrows. The other day Mattress Man miscalculated the clearance needed to get the pile of 20 or so mattresses on his head under the railway and they all fell off into the mud. Oh, and certain areas have become popular places for guys to micturate.

But because the roads are being surfaced next to the railway (which is often down the middle of dual carriageways) new white lines are appearing all over the place. Next to the bus station which is on my morning commute there is an enormous dual carriageway crossroads and the railway is up above. The north/south road now has white lines painted on to arrange the traffic into three lanes each way, but the lines just stop at the junction. The east/west route (mine) also now has three lanes each way and the lines go continuously in 6 unbroken lanes through the junction. There are no traffic lights, no roundabout, no traffic control – just hundreds of people milling around in the junction, and exasperated traffic police trying to shepherd them out of the way of a morass of mostly taxi vans and busses that now have not a clue as to who has any sort of right of way. Previous to the white lines this junction was pandemonium on a bad day. Now it’s slightly worse pandemonium most of the time.

The new white lines carry on down my route next to the now surface-level railway past a station. The station has steps down at either end of the platform that stick out into the road, reducing the carriageway from three to two and a half lanes. The white lines go literally straight past, undeviated and unconcerned – reducing the left-hand lane to half the width of a car then widening again after the station. Add to that people spewing out of the station on to the carriageway to access taxi vans jostling for position by the path opposite and you have another recipe for pandemonium.

As Haile drove me past all this chaos on Friday, in the back of the car sat a man we shall call B – a patient of mine - who needed a ride to the Black Lion Hospital situated opposite SIM HQ. He had an appointment to see an oncologist about his leukaemia which has flared up in recent months to the point that he now needs chemotherapy to at least prolong if not save his life. He needs a combination of three drugs – only two of which are available in Ethiopia. A couple of months ago the oncologist told B to ask me if I could get the third one from abroad. A quick look in the “British National Formulary” revealed this drug (“rituximab”) costs the NHS £1571.65 per dose – and B needs 6 doses - £9429.90 in the UK but a lot more if we wanted to get it from either Kenya or the USA. For B, on typical Ethiopian wages, this is an unimaginable amount of money. With his permission we have asked missionaries, teachers and their sending churches to see if they could contribute to a special fund SIM Ethiopia has, for just such situations.

That morning as B had asked me for a lift we had greeted each other in typical Ethiopian style and he had smiled and said he was well. The bulging lymph nodes in his neck belied this. He’s getting worse by the day. However there is a possibility that by an extraordinary series of events and coincidences that we can get the drug from India, and it will be quite a lot cheaper, but we still need a lot of donations. If you feel able to help B, you can do so through www.sim.co.uk by quoting project number 092546. And please would you pray for him and his young family? Thanks.