Finding a new place to eat, especially one that has decent quality food, is an exciting moment. We had heard about “Five Loaves” for some time, but our first visit was not long before we were due to head back to England for our rainy season break. They do a good breakfast, although as is usual in Ethiopia there was an absence of decent pork products. The cappuccino was lovely and had a rather complex picture on it that summed up fairly well how we were feeling. It’s been a long term, and we were both ready for a break.

There is little that calls us back to the UK more than our four children, their spouses, and their children. This June the call was especially strong, given the imminent arrival of Hannah and Dominic’s third child. Lois was born a few days before we arrived, and a short while ago when I asked Chris what her favourite moment of the six or so weeks we were away was, she unhesitatingly said “holding Lois for the first time”. But before we could pack up at the end of term and head back to the UK for a bit of rest and relaxation, there were things to do, and people to meet – some expected; some not.

As with most medical treatments here, decent physiotherapy is hard to get. I was feeling a little exasperated with the patient (a Bingham employee) in front of me, as she needed physio for her knee and she was reluctant to accept referral to the only decent (and rather expensive) service I know of. Many of my patients like to go to “Flooha” – a hot spring massage service in the middle of the city where they squirt your painful bits with jets of hot water then rub them. They love it, although as an evidence-based medical intervention it’s a little lacking, if quite cheap. Then there’s the Brook Clinic Chiropractic service. Different from any chiropractic I’ve ever come across, they tend to ask for unnecessary x-rays before they’ll do pretty much anything. Fortunately it doesn’t seem to be the sort of “straight” chiropractic that believes it can cure asthma by straightening your spine – it’s more like normal physio. However she didn’t want to go there – she wanted to go to Girum; a private hospital fairly close to Bingham. My reluctance wasn’t only based on the fact that Girum has on occasion returned uninterpretable blurred chest x-rays and once gave multiple antibiotic injections to a guy who just felt nauseous for an hour after eating a banana – I just didn’t know if Girum had a physio department.

Fortunately my senior clinic nurse Sister Aster is a veritable encyclopaedia when it comes to local services, and if she doesn’t know something she’ll definitely know how to find out. “Tinish koi” I said to my patient (loosely “wait a sec”) getting up to leave the room and seek Aster’s advice. Opening the door I saw Aster was sitting at the table in reception with a woman I didn’t recognise. Before I could ask her to find out if Girum Hospital had a physio service, she said “Ah, Dr Phil! May I introduce Sister Hannah, the head nurse from Girum Hospital? She’s come to give us their latest price list and to see if there is anything Girum can do for us.”

It has been our privilege to lead Bible study groups for a few folks on the Bingham compound this year. Most recently we spent eight weeks going through the Christian Medical Fellowship’s “The Human Journey”. Each study starts with a 15 minute video, projected on our lounge wall, of Dr Peter Saunders (the CMF’s CEO) discussing the evening’s topic and doing the groundwork for the ensuing discussion. Peter is a member of our church in St Albans and coincidentally visited Addis Ababa for a meeting so we were able to get together with him here and introduce him to a couple of our Bingham group who had been watching him on our wall for the previous eight weeks. It was great to see him (and Dr Kevin Vaughn who also lives in St Albans) and show them some of the delights of Addis. Peter has returned to the UK with a remarkable audio recording of dogs barking in the middle of the night just outside his hotel – dozens of them at once. He now understands why, when coming to Addis, a pair of earplugs are as necessary as bug spray and sun screen.

Back in May 2017 in the UK some parents were found to be tweeting the key stage 2 SATS test questions -basically cheating on behalf of their children. The Department for Education’s response? To politely ask the parents to please stop it. Here, last June, when the national school exams were taken, some similar cheating went on with questions being shared via social media. The Ethiopian Department of Education’s response this year? Shut down the entire Internet across the whole country. For a couple of weeks in June we had no land line, no 3G and no 4G Internet at all. Just before the switch-off I had spent 600 Birr (£20 or so) on a mobile Internet package for a month. A few days after the switch-off Ethio Telecom kindly advised me by text that they had cancelled my 4 gigabytes. No, there’s no way to get a refund.

As you may imagine after this we were eagerly anticipating our break in the UK. We were flying in a few days – surely nothing else could go wrong? Well it could – late at night in the airport, just before boarding the plane. But that’s another story.