Lake Bishoftu warms with the sun, just rising. Its surface thickens - coppery - and over it, water birds paddle silty circles; stirring thin black trails like tendrils of incense in a traditional coffee ceremony. They’re feeding on insects we can’t see from our balcony over the cliff. But the activity from up here becomes an artwork. We’re waking
In the ethereal sunlight that blesses early mornings in Ethiopia’s high country, we walk a path under rare giants in the grounds of a monastery 700 years-old. African sandalwood and juniper, red-flowering kosso and heavy-limbed figs mark our way through ribbons of incense to the church and meditation cave of a great saint. If these old trees could talk. They
Yesterday, a hyena broke into a kindergarten in the middle of the city. The children spotted him in the morning; still and scared beneath a large bush in the playground - and they scattered, screaming. My brother-in-law, an engineer also known for a good eye with a hunting rifle, was called in to shoot the animal. “But I left it to
Addis Ababa is a city hustling. In the open markets, the messy intersections, the ‘blue donkey’ minivans and in the coffee shops of Ethiopia’s gritty, bulging capital is the effort and enterprise of at least 6 million people. When I open my gate in the morning and close it at the end of each day, I see a man without legs
Full-lung singing and the wild clapping of a hundred small hands are heard well before stepping through the tall metal gates of Jerusalem Inclusive School. In a small compound - on a cobbled back road in one of those outer suburbs of Addis that wind coolly into the Entoto foothills - students shake off the early chill with song and
