Canada House

The team working in Addis is twelve strong and live together in a rented house on the west side of the city. It is a brand new house and is quite nice in most respects. It is built into the side of a hill so it has two stories at the front but four at the back. Some people share rooms but I have one to myself on the top floor with a little private balcony that looks out over a wooded valley. Not too bad at all! Most mornings I can watch cattle, donkeys and goats being herded out to pasture in the valley, as well as joggers running the trails. Long distance running is a national passion here, with their version of Wayne Gretzky being a famous marathon runner. We have a cook to prepare our dinners and we eat most meals communally in our kitchen/dining room. We also have a well-equipped mini-gym in the basement. The first couple of nights I had to get used to the local dogs settling scores in the valley below, but now I can sleep right through the sounds of fur flying. The previous group had a local metal worker make an oil drum grill for the house so we can have a BBQ on Sunday, the cook’s day off. We had to let the BBQ burn for a good long time to get any residue off, but I’ve always liked my steaks filled with PCB-y goodness anyway ;-)

Some of you more attentive readers may have noticed that I said the house is nice in “most respects.” The only complaint we have is the frequent power outages that occur almost every night. They usually last about an hour or two, and for those who have been here a few months, they start to wear on the nerves. When anything seems to be remotely going pear shaped, however, I always note that I could be with the part of our team working in Darfur, where the team leader has lost six notches off his belt! Everything is relative I guess, and all humans love to grumble.

We are planning a pancake breakfast for Canada Day here and have been thinking up particularly Canadian activities we can do with our guests. A constitutional conference was the first suggestion, but that proved impractical – not enough paper in Ethiopia for that. Ball hockey was another suggestion, but we lack sticks, nets and a level piece of ground. I was hoping to be the first to have to yell “Donkey” to temporarily halt the game. Oh well. Horseshoes has been suggested so we are looking for a source of both horseshoes and liability insurance. I’ll let you know how the plans progress.