Archived Blog
New Year’s in Ethiopia
Thursday 11th September is New Year’s Day in the Ethiopian calendar and so on Wednesday night we had a New Year’s Eve party. We invited all our Ethiopian staff, guards and house worker, as well as some other forengii friends. Brian bought some wood to have a bonfire, and we decided to buy some fireworks to celebrate. Fireworks in Ethiopia are in short supply, but we managed to find some in a local supermarket, and spent about £10 buying a few roman candles and other dodgy looking tubes filled with gunpowder. Most of the things didn’t have instructions or an obvious fuse or place to light them. This meant for some fun times, trying to get the things lit without blowing off a hand. Brian tried to light one, and threw it in a bush. Silence. Hmmm, better leave that one we thought, and tried another. After equally little happened, Brian decided to throw it in the fire, so we all ran to a safe distance and waited, not sure what to expect. After again nothing happened, one of our guards went back to the fire and started poking it. A small shower of sparks started coming from the tube. The other things we bought made similarly poor displays. It made us all laugh anyway.
On Thursday we had the day off school, so a number of us travelled to a new place in the country that the people that run the fistula hospital are starting. It is a retreat for all the women there, so that they can learn a new trade and have some hope of a future when they leave the care of the hospital. They have an orchard, places to raise animals, and various other trades that the women can learn.
On Saturday, Brian and I left the city for another weekend away. We went to Negash lodge, a resort in a small town called Woliso, about 2 hours drive outside of Addis. We had a relaxing weekend chilling by the pool, again enjoying the freedom of getting away from the city so easily.
To finish, I’ve added photos of a crash on the ring road; hope it doesn’t give some people nightmares! At first it was difficult to work out what had happened, a truck had jack-knifed the opposite way to the traffic direction. However, we worked out that it must have been going up the hill, broken down and it brakes had failed; thus it had rolled back down the hill and crashed, completely blocking the whole road. When it happened, there were police that were directing traffic off the ring road at the previous exit, however, they soon went home leaving some small stones across the road to warn road users in their absence. Unfortunately, this wasn’t really sufficient (duh) and the next morning, a smaller truck had obviously been driving up the ring road, probably fairly quickly, missed the stones and driven on around the corner only to be met by a crashed truck blocking the whole road. The driver had flipped the truck in an effort to avoid crashing.
A goat in the back of this truck was calmly chewing grass, sitting on the walls of the truck.
Niall
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