Feeling a welcome guest..................

February 21^st

A short interval from my last blog but making up for lost time last week and also for the fact that my next posting after today will be on Friday at the earliest as tomorrow I am going off to a distant outside clinic to spend three days returning on Thursday evening. Not exactly sure what I will be doing in this clinic but I am sure it will be interesting as I seem to be the only doctor going so I will be packing my tropical medicine book!

I suspect that Gimbi is going to feel like a massive metropolis compared to where I will be for the next few days but in fact it is far from that: the town is rather like those that exist in Western (i.e. cowboy) movies with everything revolving around the single road through the centre of the town. Gimbi begins slowly with increasing signs of habitation from the sign that says "Gimbi' on the road from Addis and gradually peters out at some unmarked point on the road towards Assossa and the Sudanese border (as Ethiopian road markings do not stretch to signage for the end of a town). The road through town is tarmacked (an improvement courtesy of the Chinese in the last two years) and there is a pavement of sorts on either side- I say of sorts as it is made of concrete blocks that like many things in Ethiopia probably had another life before becoming the pavement in Gimbi as the blocks have a metal ring embedded making them a little hazardous to walk along especially in darkness (there is only limited lighting in the evenings). As a result most people choose to walk in the road in spite of the hazard that through traffic doesn't slow much as it passes through town and the minibuses may pull into the edge as any time expecting the paedestrians to move rapidly out of their way. There is some unspoken rule that there is a "one-way" system so that you walk into town on one side of the road and back from town on the other side. This means that you need to be organised as shopping around for an item can increase the hazard by requiring more crossing of the road multiple times so in general the shops on the side of the road on the out-bound trip tend to do better business from me than the shops on the other return side but I assume it all works out as there must be people coming from the other end of town in the opposite direction.

The road from the hospital (we are at the Assossa end of town just off the main road) to the market is a distance of about a mile,  it does take 20-30minutes to walk there due to the need to detour around cows, sheep, goats and groups of people who gather along the roadside to pass the time of day. The market is not like the one of your imagination as it is all at ground level with everyone laying out their produce on mats, this in itself creates problems as it is not an entirely satisfactory solution to selling given the free range goats and it requires constant vigilance on the part of the seller not to lose a proportion of their stock to these wily & persistent animals.  Remarkably the mats seem to be laid out in the same places from one day to the next so that there must be some rules about ownership of a particular pitch. This is useful as it means you can have a reasonable idea of where to find the things you are looking for. There are also a number of shops described as "supermarkets" but this is nothing like what we mean by a supermarket and simply describes a small shop in the ground floor of a building that opens onto the street (in a stall like fashion) selling dry goods, all these supermarkets sell similar things and there is no price differential so everyone tends to find their favourite places and stick with them.

Going into town is an experience designed to remind you (in case you had forgotten) that you are different to everyone else around: Calls of "faringe,faringe"or "you , you" abound from adults and children alike as you walk along, more unusually "china, china" is also called out (foreigners all looking the same and Chinese road builder's having been here in large numbers in the recent past). However these calls are always made in a friendly way (albeit it can get slightly wearing) and the wonderful smiles you receive from everyone make this very clear that you are a always a welcome guest in their town.