Addis or the problem of time flying by…

As I said, time I flying by faster then I can realise. When I will be back from Banjul, I will have two weeks left of work and two weeks of travelling before heading back to France. I think those six months have been the fastest of my life…or something equivalent. The more you meet people, the more you feel home, the more work you have, the more week end you have travelling, the more you are lost in time. And Addis has been great for all this to me.

Going out of Addis
I went out many week ends. It is very easy to just hop in a bus and go somewhere, to rent a car and drive away. I have been to:
- Langano lake (one of the only lake in Ethiopia where ou can swim without being scared of strange worms infiltrating in your nice clean body –I mean you are not scared if you are not scare of hippos either)
- Awassa (down south, a city near by a lake where you can just …humm… chill, watch birds, walk around, visit the famous fish market and so on)
- Harar (a city to the est, with Arabic influences, that looks very different from the rest of Ethiopian cities. Small streets, houses painted in white or blue, hyenas to feed in the evening, best chat in Ethiopia, great sun and beautiful landscapes)
- Nazret and Soderi (Where there is some hot springs where you can take the hottest shower in the world, where women push you under the water for you to taste the good good natural power)
- Wenchi crater lake (where we went my car with the record of doing 30km in three hours on a pista, but 3hours that are worst as the lake is absolutely beautiful, the people are great and the quiet area is amazing)
- Debre Zeyit (one of my hot spots as it is one hour from addis and that you can go for a day. I have a friend there who has a beautiful house on the edge of one of the seven crater lakes you can find there)
I am sure I am forgetting some… but it is already good!

As opposed to staying in Addis
There also there is so many things to do. NGO market, drinking lots of juices and macchiato, showing places around to the new comers, hanging around in my hamoc, eating beaucoup de amazing breakfast, going out in cool bars or clubs, meeting friends, going to the markets or just walking around and do some shopping… et hop 1,2,3 week ends have passed. Oups!

And in Addis there is the work also. It has became more and more interesting and exciting as I got to get the trust of my colleagues who involved me in any projects I could participate in. They really made my stay fruitfull and I think my fear of the beginning have fastly faid away because I saw that I could be useful and that they even needed me! There are stuff that would need to be continued and I kind of wished they could hire me…hihi, yes because my parents are nice but the UN should be nicer and pay the people working hard for them, because it is not as if they could not afford it!
The work with the African Union (my newsletter and retreat, remember?) have been a bit forgotten because the processes within the AU just take ages and that they suggest budgets that we could never approve, so everything has to be diplomatically discussed and negotiated and this just takes months!
But there were other stuff as the Regional Coordination mechanisms meetings (UN as One initiative), the organisation of this meeting in =Banjul, translations, writing concept notes, and so on and so on…No time to be bored. So it has been very hectic at work lately and I didn’t take so much time to hang around.. (just to upload my pictures, that you are welcome to go and see as they are very beautiful of course ;)