Settling back into a routine after the Christmas/New Year break is quite difficult. Firstly, what for us is the Christmas/New Year holiday week is an irrelevance in Ethiopia – they ignore it. New Year’s Day was September 12^th, and Christmas Day (or “Gena”) was January 7^th. Although “Gena” is a national holiday not a lot happens generally as it is a purely religious festival entirely for the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. But secondly on January 20^th there’s “Timket”. And on “Timket” an awful lot happens. And the day before. And the day after. This is our third “Timket” - In 2014 we went to the heart of the celebrations (recorded here); in 2015 we stayed local (recorded here along with an explanation of what it’s all about if you’re interested). This year it was on Wednesday so pretty much the entire week went to pot.

On Monday Haile drove me to my clinic and back, and was rather concerned about Tuesday. I was more concerned about his eyes – he’d been welding all weekend and despite his protestations to the contrary I doubt he uses adequate eye protection (you often see guys welding by the side of the road wearing only sunglasses). He blamed the redness and soreness on the smoke; I diagnosed “arc eye”. Tuesday is the day all the “tabots” head for nearby water to spend the night, so parades erupt all over the place around Orthodox churches, and there is not a route between Bingham and my clinic that doesn’t have a church on it. They start after lunch so afternoon and evening travel rapidly becomes an issue. There’s no warning, no police management and no diversions. The roads just close. On Tuesday morning Haile texted me at 6:45am to say his eye was too sore to drive, so would I drive myself? Flags and patriotic bunting were appearing everywhere along with huge highly stylised religious images. I left the clinic at 1:45pm (having had Negash clean the car and having bought a huge cauliflower off one of the guards) and was successfully driving my normal route until just past the huge mosque. I’d negotiated a necessary u-turn under the railway line when suddenly guys with rocks jumped out of nowhere, stopped all the traffic and blocked the road – fortunately just beyond another gap in the central reservation allowing me another u-turn to go back the way I’d come. A long circuitous route eventually got me home.

Tuesday evening is the night we go with friends to a local hotel and eat traditional Ethiopian food. Ethiopia has more fasting days that almost any other country and the time up to festivals is always fasting, so on this occasion there was no meat, only fish stew with injera. Later that night Chris’s intestines reaped the consequences of some of the food being infected, but fortunately Wednesday was the Timket holiday so she could recover, while the city celebrated.

You’d think by Thursday it would be all over. Well it was – except for St Michael the archangel. He is highly revered in the Orthodox church and gets his own special day immediately after Timket , and there’s a St Michael’s church just behind my clinic (and another one on the route home). So around lunchtime celebrations began outside my consulting room window, blocking the traffic. It’s very difficult having a serious conversation with a newly diagnosed diabetic whilst St Michael’s “tabot” is being paraded very very slowly down the road outside accompanied by singing, dancing, preaching, and ululating. Haile snuck through the grounds of the Black Lion Hospital opposite my clinic and took me home (his eye was better now) by a St Michael-free route. Last year's celebrations can be seen here. It was exactly the same this year.

For me Friday was normal; for Chris it wasn’t. Bingham’s “Field Day” happened on Friday so she was heavily involved in helping manage the long jump. She also had to cope with one of her 4 year olds who, having competed in the first heat of the sack race, turned up in a sack in the third heat so she could have another go. Field Day happened again on Saturday so I took the opportunity to get some drone flying time in and to take a few aerial snaps. (Someone at SLC told me there’s a book out on how long it will be before I am arrested for taking aerial photos…)

The drone captured the interest of many, many small children. Here’s a brief conversation:

Me (in answer to yet another question): “There’s a GPS unit in the top so it knows where it is and knows where to land.”
Small boy: “Are you a scientist or something?”
Me: “No, I’m a doctor.”
Small boy: “You seem pretty smart for a doctor.”