I wonder when we'll have a normal week? Just when you thought Christmas was over another holiday happens. We took the usual days off over Christmas and New Year (the British ones - Americans don't do Boxing Day but we did), then the Ethiopian "Gena" happened (7th January), then this Monday there was another holiday. It wasn't entirely clear that it would be Monday or Tuesday until the last minute, but Monday it was so the clinic was closed. The Ethiopian government attempts to be nondiscriminatory to all religious groups so this holiday was a celebration of the prophet Mohammed's birthday. I came in to clinic anyway and while it was quiet I tried to do some clearing up and wanted to throw some things away. Once I had evicted a stray cat and her kitten from the clinic lobby (goodness knows how long they'd been locked in there) I emptied a couple of cupboards ready to chuck stuff out. This proves to be exceedingly difficult because as soon as you get things out from a cupboard that have been there untouched for 30 years someone will immediately think of a use for it. So the trick is dump it before anyone rumbles you. However that's quite challenging as I can't find anywhere to dump things without anyone seeing. So the next day I asked where the stuff I had put out to dump had gone, and Atsede our clinic assistant proudly showed me it all - packed nicely away in a different cupboard down the corridor. Aaugh!

As an aside, on the way across town this week Chris and I saw several men carrying huge piles of mattresses on their heads. The record for this journey was (I kid you not) twenty mattresses. The guy was walking down the road in traffic; we saw the tower of mattresses poking up above the traffic on the other side of the road before we saw how they were being transported, although the bobbing motion was a bit of a give-away. We both wondered how he would cope if he dropped them. We also wondered how you get a pile of twenty mattresses on your head in the first place.

We couldn't get a picture of Mattress Man, but here's an almost equally startling if rather poor quality picture. Look carefully (click the picture to enlarge it) - the boxes are marked "glassware".

We have met Sion again. I wrote about Sion in 2007 as she was very helpful to me while I was working at the Korean hospital. She turned up at Church in the Sunday morning Adult Bible Class. After much greeting and hugging she insisted we make a date to visit her home and eat with her. I should mention that sitting behind the adults that Sunday morning were six youngsters aged from 5 to 13, all decently dressed, well-behaved and reading or drawing quietly while the class proceeded.

So we went to Sion's modest house for dinner this week. It was the day before her 65th birthday and her husband chatted to us amiably in very good English - he is in his 70s and has had a couple of strokes but is doing well. They have brought their four children up, seen them leave home, seen three of them married and now have six grandchildren. Seven years ago Sion promised God she would adopt children orphaned by HIV/AIDS. So she has, and they were the six sitting at the back in the Bible study. Sion and her husband now have a second family that they are bringing up on their own and at their own expense. No Social Services; no NHS; no state benefits. They are doing it out of love for God and for these otherwise devastatingly needy children. Sion told us that as soon as they have grown up and left home she is happy to die - she will have done what God called her to do and she will be content.

The time we spent eating injera and drinking coffee with Sion and her husband was punctuated by several power cuts. In the course of the evening a friend turned up to take Sion to the airport. The wife of a relative had died in the USA and her body had been flown back to Ethiopia for burial. Sion had to go and collect the coffin and arrange the funeral the next day. But she put the visitor off - we were her guests and she insisted on completing her time with us before attending to this sad duty.

Time came to go. Before we left we were ushered into the children's room where they were doing homework or playing quietly. They gathered round, joined hands in a circle and sang to us: "My Saviour, He can move the mountains, My God is Mighty to save, He is Mighty to save...". Then they prayed for us.

Sion walked us back to our car before heading off to the airport. You won't meet many people like Sion.