(cont.)

Thursday, November 16th, 2006. 7.10pm. Hotel Desalegn, Addis Ababa.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, as our last evening in Addis Ababa looms, I sit in a hotel room suffused with the overpowering aroma of rich Ethiopian coffee – four 500g bags of roasted, one 500g bag of ready-to-cafetiere ground coffee, this blend apparently dubbed "God’s urine" and bought the intoxicating coffee emporium of local providers Tomoca. Now all I and my Christmas gift beneficiaries need is a grinder...

A kilo costs 41 Birr – about £2.50, and about what you’d pay for a bland mere mug back home in Starbucks or Costa Coffee or wherever, places that have always irritated me – especially, selfishly, at the thought of credulous customers spending so much on a cup, while nevertheless complaining about the slightest price rise among much more valuable-for-money newspapers…
Dr Henock was astonished, even more justly, to hear of such places – coffee farmers among his Addis congregation sell their finest flavours for just 4 Birr, or 25p, per kilo. Perhaps a fair trade opportunity in the import-export market is here for the cultivating...

For some illuminating overviews of the city slums, we were taken to the tenth floor of a rather sleazy-feeling hotel – dubiously relying on a creaky, cranking, doorless, doorless dizzy-making lift. On eventual arrival at the top, there appeared to be little to see this side of the hazy mountains, between the brutal useless towerblocks - just desolate wastelands of tin sheeting.

Except then, there are appeared a few flickers of miniscule movement in the crevices – peering more carefully, I could just about pick out laundry-hauling housewives, ball-chasing children, scraggy mangy dogs. Of course, these were the shanty "civilisations" beneath the metal sheeting, stretching as slums, as one, across the city sprawl. And still Addis keeps spreading – not vertically, as the Government planners might desire, but horizontally – ever wider, yet always looked down upon.