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Published: March 3rd 2009
Knock! Knock!
Time for dinner, humans. Sardines and cream please...So thank you one and all for all the pictures of your little kiddies, new babies and toddlers that you email us. Very nice, but please, please check the file sizes as 10Mb pictures take approximately 2 hours to download! I thought to thank you, I would treat you to some photos and videos of our ickle 'babies' 😊
We don't know if mum was one of the posse that hung around our house about this time last year, but whatever, she seems to have formed an attachment...probably because we fed her milk, sardines and meat while she was pregnant.
Then again, it might be another pregnant cat altogther. A bit like the dogs here, there ain't a huge amount of diversity. The dogs are all sandy coloured mutts with fluffy tails and the cats all short-haired patchwork quilts. All the animals are wild and a bit scabby around the edges.
If people keep a pet it will be a vicious dog-on-a-rope kept as a guard to scare would be "leybas" (thieves) and, of course, visiting Ferengi.
I suppose when its a struggle to keep a family fed, the semi-wild pooch or feral rat-catcher
is lower on the shopping list priority than the kids of course.
I have seen people throwing stones at animals as they are clearly opportunistic thieves themselves. The worst I saw was a woman launch a half-brick at a moggie from about 2 yards which caught it square on the back. Maybe it stole her meal for the day?
When you see people sleeping rough - in Addis, not so much in Assosa - then you can't get too emotional about the state of the animals over here (warning to donkey sanctuary donors: keep holidaying in Wales or where ever).
Why am I saying this and then feeding a scabby, limping mother cat and her 3 skinny offspring?
Well I guess I'm just a big softie hippocrite...besides, we have bought meat only once - the 3 birr entrails that humans won't eat - and the milk powder we use to make milk means we have to sacrifce a cup of tea. Not a big deal.
Though, yes, Sara has splashed out on a tin of sardines and a tin of tuna, that's not much over the course of 12 months; and the cats still catch
What's Sara up to???
Hmmm. Better investigate. the our rats so we're cool.
Annus* Mirabilis Did I say 12 months? Wow! We've been in Ethiopia 1 year!
Everything has been great so far. As people say with a smile "I think you are adjusting to Assosa. I think you like it!"
VSO have started asking if we have plans to extend beyond the 2 years.
I have even been asked by an IT guy I met from Mekele (Tigray) if I want to help him set up a Cisco and Windows training centre in Addis. As he (quite rightly) put it - Ethiopian degrees in IT do not prepare graduates for the real world. They'd be better off doing a Microsoft MCSE or Cisco CCNA (or both) than a 3 year degree on the theory of computing.
I would really like to set up a training centre and give the guys over here a proper hands-on training programme. Get a load of old switches, routers and PC bits off eBay and let them get their hands dirty building systems and LANs and then tearing them apart again. It really is the best way to learn.
Unfortunatey you have to (a)
You want milk?
Sara gets to stroke you... get permission to import such items and (b) pay exorbitant taxes (of between 30 to 100%!)(MISSING). And the paperwork is incredible. I did it for the stuff I imported for the Capacity Building IT training centre and it took over 2 days of my time - that was in super rush mode; badgering phonecalls, repeated visits, play the smiley Ferengi who doesn't know what he's doing but wants to help..etc
We have a few other thoughts as well. Maybe buy a round the world ticket with our end-of-service grant and visit Rwanda (Chris & Els), South Africa (Erik), Israel (Golan & Mairead & Tom & Leigh), Australia (Jude & Andy) and then the USA (Adam & Christy). Also saw a UN job that I could do in Geneva for big bucks tax free to pay off the mortgage and free ourselves from that albatross. Hmm. Who knows.
Fasting time again It's started.
The 55 day run up to Easter (Fasika) has begun and the Orthodox Christians are fasting. No milk, meat, alcohol or sex. Really strict people even don't eat or drink until 12 noon.
I was invited out by my boss to "take beer"
All that mewing...
...tires a little kitten out before fasting started.
We went to the Bamboo hotel as he needed to "take enough to last 2 months". To be fair he did well. I gave up and he was still asking me to "add one more". It was a Sunday night and I tried to explain the concept of Sunday being a school night i.e. work tomorrow, but the Ethiopian's treat Sunday night as part of the weekend still.
Quite a nice attitude when you think about it! Sod the work tomorrow, for tonight we drink!
And, of course, now everyone is vegetarian, the cats are back.
Suddenly Ferengi milk is not third choice to bits of skanky goat offal and other abandoned nasty bits.
Of course, come Fasika itself, the cats will be as stuffed with meat as the Habashas and Government Worker Accomodation B2-T1, Kebele 04 (aka. Al & Sara Beyt) will not be such an attractive joint to hang out anymore 😊
That's my finger, not your dinner, pal... We clearly give off the scent of daft Ferenge with a soft spot for small fluffy animals.
Unfortunately for Roland the Rat who decided to move in last
Hey Mr Rat, what do you think this house is?
Some kind of refuge for skinny Ethiopian animals?? weekend, our tolerance does not extend to buck-toothed critters who leave little black pellets around the kitchen and behind the bedside table.
But amazingly it seems that even the rats turn their nose up at the vegetarians!
Instead of nibbling any of the spuds, onions or carrots in the kitchen our daft doormouse tucked in to my favourite set of super dense ear plugs.
The ones I got from Emirates.
The ones that keep ALL sounds out.
And now the fasting has started we are in all night church wailing territory. I NEED them ear plugs buddy; and you ate one of them!!!!
I couldn't work it out? Why was the tip of my ear plug in pieces with a big gappy-toothed indentation half-way down the remaining chunk? Then I saw the tell-tale droppings around the floor. Grrr!
Now I have to sleep with my head facing right, towards the wall. Uber ear-plug in the right ear, lightweight earplug in the left ear, with left ear pressed hard into the bed to keep the waves in the air from disturbing my calm.
But to cap it all, I woke up in the
Come on in, bud
We got 3 cats that would like to (m)eat you, pal :) middle of the night and the rat-faced rodent is chewing away on one of my fingers!!! I guess he finally worked out that the ONLY meat in the house was us?
Fortunately it grabbed a finger nail and no harm done. It consoled itself by shredding the ends of the mat by the side of the bed and laying another round of little black happy eggs.
Quit your singing and get on with the killing The cats seem particularly unimpressed that their sugar daddy and milk mummy are getting bugged by a rat. They come running first thing in the morning when they hear the door go and then congregate to sing their catty carols at our doorstep every hour thereafter.
We give them milk twice a day but given they probably have worms and their mum is limping and cannot hunt as well as she ought to, they probably spend the day in a constant state of hunger.
They are wild animals though. They hate being touched, stroked or picked up.
Try it and get a scratch for your trouble.
Look like you are about to try it and you get a
Catch rats? (YAWN)
We got better things to do. Like sleep, thanks... hiss and a waft of some nasty smell they emit (I tried to tell Sara it's just the smell YOU would emit if some creature 200 times larger than you tried to pick you up, but she ain't buying it).
Sara has managed it a few times. Put the food down, wait for them to hunker down and
swipe too slow kitt-e-kat - you're gonna get a stroke, like it or not.
I think like breaking a horse in, she feels she can tame them into the kind of docile, in-bred balls of fluff that people in the UK dress in santa hats after a numbing diet of additive-laced processed horse. I even saw some cat food back in the UK for lactose-intolerant cats with gluten-sensitive colons.
I would be more outraged but one of the cats sicked up its last bowl of milk and I think Sara's Googling "lactose + intolerant + cats + food" as I type...
RIP (Rat In Peace) So this morning I get a text.
The rat - who last night shat all over the surfaces of an unfeasibly high cupboard - is no more.
Little ginger kitty
Good work little fella!
Ratboy rues the day he munched on my favourite earplug! - the shy and slightly backward (Sara disagrees. She would) one of the bunch - had somehow managed to off the rat within 10 minutes of us leaving for work!
I guess we should be glad that the cats have not become completely dependent on Ferengi handouts...
...though I have this gut feeling that after 5 days in a house of vegetarians the rat just gave up.
With half a rotten ear-plug in its gluten-sensitive colon; and not a whiff of meat for another 50 days it just decided to end it all.
The little ginger kitten probably just yawned...
..and ratboy shrugged, sighed and jumped on in.
* That's Annus, not anus. One means a "year of wonders" and other means something, well, completely different...
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