Addis Ababa

We are walking down the street in the centre of Addis. People smile, nobody stares, Ossian gets a kiss and then another from passersby. Women walk by in traditional white dresses and shawls, majestic hair braids, passing young girls in skinny jeans and big hairdos.

Rubbish fills the gutters, piled up on the sides of the dirt roads, trodden into the muddy ground. A light rain falls, severed goats heads lie in the dirty puddles, leftover from the end of fasting celebrations over the easter weekend. This was one of the first countries in the world to adopt christianity as the official religion, and orthodox christianity remains the dominant religion.

Donkeys and emancipated horses pull wooden carts, a heard of goats walks through the traffic. Blue and white Lada taxis, remnants of Ethiopia’s communist era, drive by in varying degrees of dilapidation.

There are beggars, old women, children, a naked man curled into the fetus position, whole families begging. Buildings of corrugated iron sit beside four star hotels and palaces, Ethiopia had one of the oldest monarchies in the world.

Now here is an open space, the debris of doors and windows pressed into the dirt. We are told there used to be houses here, a whole community flattened to make way for a new road. There has been no compensation, and people are picking through the debris, looking for anything they can salvage.

We stop for lunch in one of the many pizzerias, the influence of five years of Italian occupation, the closest Ethiopia has come to being colonized. Next door there is an ice-cream parlor.

A group of men in overalls stand on the pavement welding seats into a parked car, arabic-sounding pop music playing from the doorway behind them. “Salama” the people greet us, “peace be with you’”.

Kapsoi

Adharanand and I are walking home from the Mitumba. We step off the tarmac road onto the the dirt road that leads to our neighbourhood, Kapsoi. There are people walking, familiar faces, a boy with a stick herding two cows, an old man. We great each other as we pass.

At the end of the dirt road is the kiosk selling milk and sweets. Lila is sitting behind the counter with a young baby, Mercy, on her lap, while Mercy’s mother serves a customer.

Just outside the door to the kiosk, Uma has set up shop on rickety bamboo table, usually used for selling cabbages and spinach. She is selling a selection of stones. A few children are gathered in front of her stall, pretending to buy them.

A neighbor, Sarah, stops to talk. I tell her we are leaving Iten in a few days time. She asks about my house in England. “Do you own a cow there?”

“No”

“Why not?” she looks at me with a mixture of disbelief and pity, “You must buy one when you get home”.

Back at our house, there are voices coming from the vegetable patch. Ossian and Flora emerge from the tangle of vines with pockets full of passion fruit and tree tomatoes.

We sit on the grassy slope in the garden eating them, watching mousebirds flying in and out of the vines. A neighbours' cow is mooing, a baby crying.

As the sky darkens Adharanand goes to look for Lila an Uma. He finds them down a narrow pathway, inside a small wooden shack, drinking sweet milky Kenyan tea and watching Kalenjin music videos with their friends.

School pick up

I am collecting Lila and Uma from school today. I wait for them to come out of class in the little grass square in the centre of the school buildings.

Uma comes first, holding firmly onto Hilda’s hand, talking and smiling. “We learnt that there’s air in the soil today” she tells me, taking my hand. She explains how they took it in turns to pour water on the soil, watching as little air bubbles burst on the surface of the soil.

Lila is a while coming, so we watch the children leaving to go home for lunch. A teacher comes over and greets us, taking Uma’s hand “hello again my friend” she says.

Then we see Lila, looking pleased, walking with Maureen and Brenda. She spots us and slows down, taking the long path round the square to avoid walking with us.

Uma and I walk ahead with Hilda, Uma chatting away, her rucksack on her back like all the other children. Lila is behind us, lingering with her friends, waiting for us to move out of sight.

The wind is blowing the dust around, in our eyes and mouths. We cross the main road, children fanning out across the road and disappearing into doorways and down alleyways.

Lila runs over to us, “Maureen wants to show me her mother’s shop”. Mama Maureen has a kiosk set back from the main road, selling sodas and secondhand running trainers. The girls get a soda each.

On the way up the hill I stop to buy some food from the little supermarket and the girls walk on home together. Here even the youngest children usually walk to school without an adult, accompanied instead by older friends or siblings.

Back home Lila and Uma show me their exercise books in which they have been copying lines of Swahili off the blackboard. Brenda has helped Uma with hers. The teacher sat in the staffroom marking, the children bringing their work to be checked and then returning to class to continue unsupervised.

Although Lila and Uma have enjoyed school, it was a long day for them and they are both tired. Too many questions and stares from the other children. It is a few days before they are ready to go again.

Rose

We are sitting, Adharanand, Ossian, Uma and I, on a small sofa in a dim room. Light is pushing in at the open doorway behind us, and from a window on the wall by the door, but the back of the room remains in shadow. Opposite our sofa, in touching distance, is a bunk bed, the top bunk missing, broken. A mattress is rolled up in the corner under the window. In the shadows, a water tank, gas cooker, some bundles. Overhead, an energy saving light bulb. A stool, covered with a cloth, acts as a table, an old sweatshirt is a doormat. We are at the home of Rose and her four children, Mark, Joseph, Jasmine and Natasha.

We first met Rose on an old school bus, driving to the start of the women's race organised by the Iten town council. She squeezed through the crowd waiting to board the bus, climbing on behind us, and sitting down on the empty seat next to me. Little, slight, with a shy smile, she told us she was in training as an athlete, despite an injury to her left hip that caused her to limp slightly.

The bus pulled up at the start of the race and the engine stopped. All the passengers leapt up from their seats and started pulling off their clothes, stripping down to lycra pants and vests. Excited, chatting, they sprinted off the bus and over to a lone shed in the corner of a field, the loo. Before the last of them had managed to get off the bus, the race organisers were calling for the race to start, and within seconds they were off, disappearing down the road we had just driven along, Rose struggling along near the back.

Rose gets up before 5 o'clock every morning to go for a morning run with her training partner, a Ugandan lady called Jen who runs for the Ugandan national team, leaving her children sleeping at home. Her husband has left her. Jen is talking now, sitting on Rose's broken bunk bed, answering my question about how things are now in Uganda. There have just been peaceful elections for the first time in many years. She tells us that people have had enough of the fighting, especially the women. When there is fighting, she says it's the women who suffer the most. The men simply run away, but the women cannot leave their children, and cannot run carrying them. There are women in Uganda with no eyes, others with no breasts, or no nose, no ears, sometimes no mouth. Cut off during the fighting.

We sit drinking milky tea and eating slices of white bread. Rose's daughters fall asleep on the bottom bunk. They are not well, a fever. They came round to visit us the other day, sitting quietly on the sofa in our sitting room staring at Lila and Uma. They do not speak English, most people learn English in school, and Lila and Uma know only a few words in Swahili. They played with the dolls for a while, then all went outside to play catch with a ball. Rose told us she had no food at home that day, that they had only had tea to drink for the last two days.

Rose's home is in a courtyard made up of identical, single-room dwellings. Cloth's hang over the doorways, women come in and out, slow and busy. One is washing the dishes in a bucket outside, another washes clothes and hangs them up to dry. In the centre of the grassy courtyard is a water pump, below it a muddy ditch, a makeshift swing, sheep, rubbish. It is raining gently, above us a rainbow.

Uma is delighted with the swing, made from a wooden frame with a loop of rope. Mark lowers if for her, he speaks English well. Ossian is delighted with the sheep. He trots after them, throwing stones and laughing. Now Uma is jumping back and forth over the muddy ditch, a group of small children watching her with surprise. One of her shoes falls off and gets covered in mud. Mark pumps some water from the well and cleans it for her.

We finish our tea and step outside to say goodbye. The children are playing with a football. By the front door stands a collection of old containers and tubs. Rose has planted flowers in them, "I love flowers" she tells me. We walk home at dusk, kerosine lamps lit in the shops, the streets busy, bustling still. Uma is chatting away, "Was Mark the first born?", "And who was the second born?", "Mummy, don't tell Lila about the swing, I want to tell her first". A choir is singing in the little park, a crowd has gathered to listen. We arrive home in the dark.

Market

On the other side of the town's playing field, behind the District Works Office, is the fruit and veg market. Open air, the wooden stalls shaded by corrugated roofs, it is open everyday from dawn till dusk. At the entrance sit the charcoal sellers. Two women perch on wooden stools, their hands working away at some crocheting while their eyes watch the passers-by. Their children sit next to them on the ground, waving to us. Behind them, a line of huge white sacks, the tops stuffed with leaves to stop the charcoal from falling out.

You enter the market through big, wide metal gates. Stalls run all around the edge of the square, one row in the centre. The pitches by the gates are brimming with food, the pitches at the back end are almost all deserted. On our first visit we walked the full circuit of stalls, interested to see what each one sold. They all sell the same. Our progress was slow as each stall-holder, all of them women, was keen to greet us, wanting to know our names and where we came from. We stopped to talk with a lady called Virginia, her two young children sleeping under the shade of the tin roof while she worked. She told me that they accompany her everyday to the market. This will be their playground until they are old enough to go to school.

Now we are regular customers at Filomena's stall, a few pitches in from the gate. From the roof hang bunches of bananas, bags of carrots and garlics, and piled up under it's shade are mounds of tomatoes, green oranges, mango, papaya and sweet potatoes, bunches of spinach and chard. Standing off the ground on wooden pallets are sacks of grains, rice, millet, kidney beans and tiny dried-up silver fish. She tells me she buys the produce direct from the farmers, who deliver it to the market in their vans. One day we saw one of these vans arriving, and a tug-of-war broke out among the stall-holders at the far end over the bags of grain.

Ossian loves to dig his hands into the grains, letting them spill over onto the floor. Usually one of the market ladies will come over and try to pick him up, making him shout out crossly and forget what he's doing. Filomena chats to us as she serves us, offering Uma a banana and asking her if she will stay and help her with the stall. Uma shakes her head shyly, watching in amazement as Filomena keeps a tally of how much we owe her, scratching the numbers onto the back of her weathered hand with a knife.

The lady next to her is knitting a jumper for her son while she waits for customers, expertly working a Fairisle design onto the front of it. Some of the stall-holders stand chatting to each other, watching the shoppers walking in through the gates. Others are busy talking on their mobile phones. All of them are wearing skirts and long aprons.

We load our shopping into a bag and set off, walking down the path to the playing field and the shortcut home, followed by curious stares and excited laughter.

Mitumba

A woman sits in the centre of a small square of grass. Encircling her, piled up as high as her head, are mounds of clothes. Beyond her small fortress sit other women, sometimes a man, each on their own small patch of grass, criss-crossed with narrow dirt pathways. This is the Mitumba, a clothes market that comes to town every Saturday. Each stall-holders specialises in a different type of clothing; sweatshirts, women's blouses, dresses, baby clothes, trainers, children's jumpers etc. It's the ultimate jumble sale.

One of our neighbours, Evelina, Maureen's mum, specialises in trainers. Over tea at her house one morning, a catholic music video playing in the background, she tells me how she started selling trainers to pay for her niece's school fees. Her sister died a few years ago, and her brother-in-law disappeared, leaving her to raise her sister's children as well as her own. She travels to Nairobi to buy the trainers from a warehouse filled with sacks of donated clothes and jumble. It's cheapest to buy an unopened sack of trainers, but Evelina prefers to go and choose the pairs she wants, 'that way you don't get any you can't use" she tells me.

Walking through the patchwork of stalls, people, mainly women, are busy rummaging while the stall holders call out their prices, "10-10" (each item is ten Shillings), "40 Bob". They stir the mounds of clothes with their hands, bringing the bottom layers up to the top, as the shoppers work their way methodically through each item. Lila and Uma dive into a pile of girls clothes, pulling out a sparkly pink cardigan and a fairy dress.

Down on the main street a man sits by the side of the road carefully unpicking the sole of an old shoe. Behind him rows of new soles hang neatly from a line of string, waiting to be sown on. Next to him, another man is intent on polishing up an old pair of brogues, readying them for sale in the market. Re-use. Re-cycle.

A man walks by wearing a stack of hats. Around his waist are slung dozens of beaded belts, from his outstretched arms hang bracelets, necklaces swing from his neck. He is a walking display cabinet, a portable shop. Adharanand stops to look at a stall of running trainers, laid out in pairs on the ground in front of a rubbish-strewn ditch. Running trainers are big business here in Iten, Evelina told me she sold a whole sack of them during the course of one Saturday.

Over there a woman is selling corn, cooking it over charcoal. Next to her another lady has sugarcane. We buy some, and she slices it with a machete, quartering the stalk so we can suck on the woody insides, the sticky juice running down our fingers. A man cycles past with a sofa strung to the back of his bike. The market goes on all day, until it gets too dark to see.

Sunrise

It's 6am and we are all awake. Outside the kitchen window the sun is spilling over the distant mountains. Lila and Uma's bags are ready, waiting at the door, their clothes laid out on the end of their beds. Today they are going to school in Iten.

Last Friday we all went to visit Sunrise Academy, a church-sponsored primary school that Maureen, Brenda and Hilda, our neighbours' children, go to. We were given a tour of the school and an enthusiastic welcome from the children, and arranged that Lila and Uma would come and spend a day or two in the class of their friends.

Perhaps their welcome was too enthusiastic, because now Lila is saying she doesn't want to go. She tells me she's scared. Scared of hundreds of pairs of eyes staring at her, hundreds of curious hands wanting to touch her, and of the noise of hundreds of shouting, laughing, overexcited children.

We arrive just after 7.30am, but most of the children are already in school. A few late-comers, who can't be more than three or four years old, run in behind us, wide eyed at the sight of these strangers. We walk over to the staffroom and greet the Deputy Head. He is seated in his office, a bare room with two simple wooden tables piled with paperwork and marking, a couple of white plastic chairs, a timetable stuck to the wall.

Hilda and Maureen come to take Lila and Uma to their classroom to prepare for assembly. Uma runs off with them, arm in arm with Hilda. Lila wont let go of my hand. She starts to cry. The Head Teacher, Henry, comes over, and puts his hand on Lila's shoulder. "It is normal" he says, "it is a new experience for her". Lila decides to wait with Ossian and I until after assembly, which is taking place on the grass square in front of the staffroom.

We are brought a chair and sit down to wait. Ossian wanders up and down the veranda picking up stones and throwing them onto the grass. Lila sits on my lap. From behind closed classroom doors comes the sound of chattering, laughter, bustling energy. The doors burst open and children parade out onto the pathways. The square in front of us is filling up quickly as they organise themselves into rows. I spot Uma, a big grin on her face, holding the hands of Hilda and Maureen. She disappears into a row of children, her head lost behind the row in front.

The entire school is now gathered in front of us, facing the veranda where we are waiting with the teachers. The youngest class of three and four year olds stand at the front, dressed in winter coats, their hoods pulled up over woolly hats. The strong morning sun shines in our eyes, it feels hot already.

A group of eight older children march out in front of the assembly, following orders shouted to them by another child. In military style they turn on their heals and salute the assembly. One of the group steps forward and raises the flag, everyone starts to sing, lead by two tall girls. The group salutes again and swivel on their heals to leave, marching off down the path.

Henry is addressing the children. Ossian starts to cry, the sun is too bright for him. As I carry him into the shade of the staffroom I catch a few words of Henry's talk. He is telling the children that we are all the same, that there is no difference between us. I wonder if this is for Lila's sake, to try and calm the children's overexcited behaviour at the sight of two little blond girls in their class.

Assembly is over, the children file out of the square and back to their classrooms. Uma reappears, still grinning. The sight of her seems to cheer Lila up, and she runs over and joins in the line behind Uma, glancing back to make sure Ossian and I are still there. We follow them into the classroom, a corrugated metal building with no windows, light streaming in from the gap between the walls and the roof. Pairs of wooden desks are arranged in rows, facing a large blackboard. Handmade posters are stuck on the walls.

Uma is sitting down at a pair of desks, squeezed onto the bench between two children. She is busy unpacking her bags. Maureen motions for Lila to come and sit down next to her, a small crowd gathers around as Maureen helps Lila to put her things inside the desk. A shout goes up that Teacher is coming, and the crowd disperses to find their desks. Lila seems to be OK now, so Ossian and I wave goodbye to the class and walk home.