Most mornings one of us visits a small shop to buy bread for breakfast. The shop is only round the corner from us, on one of the main streets. It’s actually a café that also sells bread and cakes, but like many of the buildings lining the main roads in Awassa, the front of it was demolished several months ago to make space for road widening. For the first couple of months I had to scramble over a pile of rubble to get to the bread counter, which was practically out in the street as the front of the building had literally been torn off. Now, the rest of the café has re-opened and the pile of rubble has slowly subsided, although the section containing the bread counter stills looks naked. The broken edges of the supporting walls advertise where the front wall used to be. The two men who run the place have quickly become used to one of us Ferenji asking for bread and always enjoy our attempt to use Amharic.

Our loyalty to the bread shop is not because the bread is good. To our surprise all the bread here is white and we are craving, fantasising about even, wholegrain bread. The cakes are not much better – sweet, bland and stodgy. Apparently wholegrain bread is a sign of poverty, a sign that you live in such basic conditions that you have to use unrefined ingredients. How perverse it is for “refined” products to be seen as a sign of sophistication.

A large bread roll is 50 santeem (half a Birr). Our standard breakfast is white bread rolls with bananas and honey. A very occasional treat is to buy a small tub of crap chocolate spread. An alternative and more substantial breakfast is porridge. Oats are sold in tins and porridge made with powdered milk provides some variety from stodgy bread. When I go home I want to have scrambled eggs with butter and baked beans on wholemeal toast…