All is not well in West Wollega

All is not well in West Wollega, but more of that anon. An eleven hour mini bus journey, with Karen being bounced on the back seat, giving rise to muscular spasm even now 2 days later, an intermittently vomiting freeloading Ethiopian in the middle seat and me sitting on my own (having played the age and corpulence card) in the front listening to interminable Ethiopian music. (Ethiopian music is not likely to be the way to a future in the West for Ethiopian wanabee pop stars.)
I fear that my days of front seat fascism may be numbered if Karen has her way but I shall fight to the finish, but now we are safely in Addis, which is a different world and our perspective has changed already from thinking it cheap to thinking it expensive. Anyway we are into the endless round of frustrations, incomplete paper work and drives in condemned, smelly and dangerously treadles tired Ladas. We have developed the habit of turning up at Government Offices which for Faraanjis (for that is what we are) are invariably situated out of town where the less well off criminal classes are and beggars abound. You should understand that in this hand out economy criminality is the way of the world and your measure of success is how good you are at it, life is all about scrabbling for the extra Birr.
We went to visit the premier midwifery school in Ethiopia which is related to the Hamlin hospital and does its best to screen people to get the highest quality midwives and works hard to turn out an intelligent thinking product, and equip them to return to their villages and help. It is situated sufficiently far out of Adddis that they are unlikely to get to the flesh pots there, so they have little to do but study. They frequently go on strike as they feel that problem based learning is more difficult than lectures and as their diploma is not worth more than the government one, why should they bother. It would appear that in Ethiopia nobody fails anything which probably explains a lot.
I have a letter from the British Embassy to help (I hope) to get our car in but it was a pdf and as such totally unacceptable to the Ethiopian Authorities, however trying to get the original from the Embassy, with wilful obstruction rudeness and dissembling officialdom is proving at best bloody irritating. However one hopes that their response to letter of complaint will take them as long as it has taken me to get a response from them, and yes the clock is still ticking. Meantime I am missing (the result of momentarily keeping my eye off the ball) a crucial letter to get my immigration status sorted out and Surrey email for staff seems to have gone down grr - the endless frustrations. As I write this some venal agent who might be able to help with the car import is running late in the traffic – it is always thus.
Sorry West Wollega willhave to wait. Thae Academic censor has just read my offering!