Christmas is coming

3 signs of Christmas this week :

The really good news is that our son Andrew will be coming to visit for Christmas. It will involve a rather gruelling journey with Ethiopian Airlines via Hamburg and spending Christmas morning in transit from Addis, but it is very exciting.

If some of the shops in Kamembe do not take down last year’s decorations soon, they will not need to! Last year the few public decorations we saw only appeared 2-3 days beforehand. They all lasted a long time afterwards, but "Alimentation OK" has gone for the year-round look.

The school holidays have started, except for those who are sitting national exams. As we travel around during the day, this means more calls of “Mzungu!”, “Good morning!” (at any time of the day) and “Banjower!” (oh, those French accents). There is also football on every available patch of flat land, which are not many. In the evening many of the boys take goats to graze, so a football pitch will have equal numbers of players and animals scattered across it. Neither seems to mind too much.