Coffee, emails and Rice Pudding (sort of)

Thursday 24th April

Quiet day at the campus! Nicholas called in to suggest coffee. Back for a short time and then Abeba came to ask me for coffee! So coffee morning. Abeba likes to talk. First about the language group we’re going to start next week, then about her mother who lives in Mekele with her younger brother. Since her husband died, the mother is constantly being moved around. Under the socialist regime, they were given a home because her husband was a teacher. The new regime have reprivatised the housing and now her rent is constantly being put up and she has to keep moving. Abeba wants to build her a house but thinks it will cost around 40,0000 Birr for one room and a toilet. With her salary around 2000 birr a month and her own family to keep as well as sending money to support her mother and brother, it is going to be difficult for her to save enough for this.

At home Mekdes and I decided to check her new email address to see if Michael or Gill had written. But Mekdes couldn’t remember her password. Spent the next half hour trying to explain the password and eventually realised that we hadn’t even agreed on the meaning of ‘word’. All prompts at getting her to remember her password failed so I sent for a reminder. Trouble was, neither of us could remember the basic information (including her birthday) that was required to get a password reminder. Nothing for it but to start again.

Setting up an email address should be easy but, if you don’t know when you were born, have no idea what the reminder questions mean (e.g. pet’s name, school mascot!) then this becomes a decidedly tricky business. Having discussed memory for some considerable time, I decided it might be better to write down all the information. For some bizarre reason, Yahoo also requires an alternative email address to send the password reminder to! So I had to give mine.

Then off round to see Kebebe, Adina and the rest of the family. Was served up something that can only be described as a savoury rice pudding but with wheat and no sugar. Extremely bland and rather a lot of it. I ate very slowly as I had been offered shiro as a follow up! Then the coffee ceremony and a brief look at the BBC World news before being escorted home after Adina had extracted a promise for her to visit me next week.

I was also invited around Sunday morning before I go to lunch at Mekdes’s house. Said I could not eat more than one doro wot in one day but promised to bring my guest Allan round to eat my share! Hope he’s up for it!