I feel like I’m being bitten, sat here at the computer but there is no sign of mozzies anywhere. It has really cooled down here lately – not so much that you have to wear jumpers but enough to make a difference to energy levels. Need to get back to running again but I’m waiting for Mike to recover from my cold!

I’ve got a new best friend! One of the college staff, the woman who cleans the offices, invited me to her house on Sunday. She’d asked me over a week ago but I thought she was telling me she was going to leave Awassa and go back to her family for a couple of months! Her English isn’t much better than my Amharic! Anyhow, I finally understood what she was asking and off I went. Getting to her house was a complex journey from college involving my first garry ride – it was fab! A garry is one of the main forms of transport here – on most of the roads in Awassa you walk, cycle or use a garry. A garry is a ramshackle cart pulled by a horse. On the three or four tarmac’d roads the garry is replaced by beaten up taxis. (Most of the garry horses look really badly treated so I haven’t rushed to use one before but this one seemed ok). I hadn’t realised that Awassa was so big, we took so many twists and turns I had no idea where I was. My friend and two of her sisters lived in the service quarters behind a house – two of them shared a room three metres by three metres that had last been painted probably when it was built about 50 years ago. There was just space for a bed and a mattress on the floor. It was one of about 10 rooms around a yard festooned with washing and heaving with small children. Inside, coffee cups were ready for the coffee ceremony and one sister was cooking on the kerosene stove – first a cabbage dish, then shiro. They had made their own crisps, there was popcorn, bread and injera. Once the food was ready we ate – in the meantime the coffee making was proceeding. This starts with washing the raw beans then roasting them slowly over charcoal. Once roasted, they were removed and ground and the jubena put on the charcoal to heat the water (Mike has a picture of a jubena on his blog). The coffee was divine as ever. I’d been worried beforehand about how we would communicate but I was told as long as you keep saying how good everything is you are ok! It is true! I took along a phrase book too so we spent some time reading it together and asking questions about family.

So humbling really, the whole experience. Here are people who have next to nothing and yet are prepared to share it so willingly. After a few hours I said I had to leave – I thought I’d been understood when two sisters stood and escorted me out but we ended up at the third sisters house where the coffee was ready. I had so much coffee that day, it took me a while to recover! Anyhow, eventually I was escorted back to a location I recognised and was able to find my own way home from there!