Well, Easter Sunday was a day I will never forget. Fasil, our landlord, invited us to join him and his family at his parent’s house in Yirga Alem, a small town about 30km to the south of Awassa. Easter is one of the most important holidays to Ethiopians, and nearly every family travels to assemble at their parent’s home. Not only was this going to be an interesting experience but simply travelling to Yirga Alem and back turned out to be an adventure. Unlike many other NGOs, we don’t have the use of cars-with-drivers and have to travel as the locals do. Getting to Yirga Alem involved catching a “bus” i.e. what we at home would call a minibus. I don’t mean a nice, new, long-wheelbase, additional-headroom minibus with decent seats and seatbelts. No, the “bus” was a VW campervan-sized 12-seater which was seriously clapped-out. Catching the bus was the easy part. Waiting for it to actually depart was another matter. Small buses here don’t go anywhere until they are nearly full. We set off with five people, and then stopped a few metres later and reversed back to where we had started from in the hope of collecting more. Only once we were nearly full did we properly leave. We then discovered that “nearly full” meant something completely different from the bourgeois concept we have at home. Whenever the driver’s assistant (who spent the journey basically hanging out of the side door touting for passengers) saw somebody waiting at the roadside he would signal the driver to stop and pick them up. When we reached TWENTY passengers I thought this must be the limit. Oh no, as long as people could squeeze in, they did. People were sitting on each others knees and on the floor, and there were three people in the front passenger seat at one point. I could move my head and just about move my left leg. Everybody was cheerfully accepting of all this and we soon realised this was normal, even when the side door nearly fell off and the driver and his mate had to re-mount it on its runners. Mercifully the journey only took one hour, briefly interrupted by having to stop to change a wheel. Not only did the wheel-change allow everyone to get out and re-establish contact with the parts of the body deprived of circulation, but it also allowed me to watch them replace a knackered and utterly bald tire for an equally knackered and utterly bald spare tire.

The locals clearly don’t see many Ferenji in Yirga Alem, because we were instantly surrounded by a little group of people just staring at us. We were soon rescued by Fasil who escorted us to his parent’s house. We were greeted by his parents, all four sisters, one brother, in-laws, three nieces & nephews, cousins and friends. A large spread of food appeared and we were urged to stuff our faces as much as possible. Easter is also the end of fasting from animal products, so the family had been gorging on meat from soon after midnight. They had nearly finished eating their way through the meat from three chickens and a sheep. The London Marathon was on a large TV. The great Ethiopian runner, Haile Gebreselassie, was running and we had the bizarre experience of sitting in a very comfortable fairly middle-class home (nicer in many ways than a lot of houses in the UK) in Ethiopia listening to Brendan Foster and Steve Cram commentating on the race. The scenes of London seemed to be from a different planet and, most fascinating of all, it was grey and drizzling. Everybody looked so white!

Fasil is the only one in the family who speaks decent English, so the conversations passed largely via him, or via sign language and broken Amharic by us. At home people might choose to moan about Tony Blair, the government and the state of the country, but at least we can do so openly and freely. Running and food were the hot topics. Some people here like to talk about politics. Not many Ethiopians are brave enough to talk openly about it as there is a lot of anti-government feeling. The current prime-minister, Meles Zenawi, is, in the eyes of many, eroding democracy and trying to quash any opposition by divide-and-rule tactics. He was backed by the rebel movement from the Tigray Region in the north, which ousted the murderous communist dictator, Mengistu, in 1991. A new constitution was introduced, which divided Ethiopia into Regions along broadly ethnic lines. The Federal approach seems to be encouraging ethnic tensions and rivalries which didn’t really exist before. The UK and other countries have suspended direct aid in response to the government’s handling of protests in Addis Ababa in November. The trials of the main opposition party leaders are currently taking place in Addis.

We were taken to visit Fasil’s aunt’s house afterwards. Despite having just eaten, she repeatedly asked us to eat. Fasil saved us from forced feeding and we thought it was time to get going, so we could be back in Awassa before dark. There was no need to worry. One of Fasil’s friends arranged for the next bus to stop at the house and collect us and would keep the front seats free. So we then had another bizarre experience of being collected by a bus from the front door of the house and ushered into the empty front seats, while the rest of the bus was packed with human sardines contorted into weird shapes to make maximum use of the space.

Front seats meant more legroom and comfort. They also meant being closer to the point of impact in the event of an accident, as the driver took off like a maniac. Sitting in the front of a clapped-out van, with no working dashboard instruments, ignition keys which kept falling out, no seatbelt and a windscreen streaked with cracks as the driver slalomed around potholes, vehicles and children kept me fully awake. The engine had clearly been thrashed a bit too often, because it cut out every minute or so. The driver would get out, do some fiddling around under the van until the engine re-started and then would rev like mad until the engine died again further along the road. The high point was when he got half the passengers to bump start the engine by pushing the bus backwards down a hill. We were still in the front seats, watching in the mirrors as a very large bus approached from behind as we were still rolling backwards towards it. The big bus clearly took the hint, stopped and took us all onboard as we abandoned the now-miserable minibus driver in the middle of nowhere.

The big bus was a proper grown-up bus, probably designed to seat about 60 people and now carrying something like 80 sardines. Once again, all available space was used. The mixture of life onboard, the urban-bus-type seats, the windscreen wipers the driver didn’t use even though it was raining, the cramming-in, the attempt by one of the passengers to get the driver to play his tape of Ethiopian music instead of the driver’s tape, and the cheerful, accepting nature of everyone fitted my stereotype image of a bus ride in Africa. The bus had started from Moyale, on the border with Kenya. Many of the passengers had been on it for 12 hours.

As Gill said to me afterwards in Awassa, it felt as if we had finally arrived in Africa.