18/11/10

After a dodgy sleep, we had an early rise with Kath, popped to the cafe before grabbing some bananas and jumping in a taxi with a Russian girl to an orphanage.

The trip was a real eye-opener. At first, me and Jack had no idea what to do. It was very awkward just watching young orphan kids rolling around (some disabled). But we got stuck in playing with the kids and looking after them for two hours, putting a smile on their faces. Most of the time we were just lifting them up and down in the air, pushing them around on broken toy cars and bouncing balls around. One lad I'll never forget was little Emmanuel (Emanny) who was partially disabled down his right side. He was a cute kid and couldn't stop laughing at my footy tricks and beating a mini drum!

Walking around the rest of the site, we saw all the beds and other children and pregnant moms off the street - not so nice.

Another thing, the Ethiopians say their times 6 hours ahead! Eg. it's 9.14 here atm, but they would say it's 3.14! Crazy!

After the orphanage visit, Kath, Jack and I popped to a cafe by the school Andy works at, for a drink before she picked her son up. All the teachers we had met at the embassy nights before came and joined us at the cafe before Andy sorted us out with some more mean Injero and Shera! Except this time it didn't go down so well....I also had a mare in ordering a schweppes thinking it was lemonade....it was bloody tonic water!

Shortly after we assisted Andy as head of PE at Sandford private school in Addis. Jack and I arranged a four-team football tournament which was very successful! The kids were about 11-12 and surprisingly some of them were class! This one white lad from Somerset and a lad with dreads shone, and in the final a lad in goal kept out about 10 shots in 5 minutes to deny the white lad (though his team won on pens in the final!)

All these kids enjoyed it so much they were asking for us to come back next week and teach them and shook our hands and were telling us how much of a great day they'd had.

A little bit later we joined Andy and his American basketball coach Marlo to coach the 13-15 yr old bball team. They were in the semi-finals of a competition and from what we had heard and seen in the warm-up, they were going to get battered. However, they started well, but soon slumped to 29-9 down. And then they came back and almost pulled off a great comeback only losing 35-31 - if only they could hit free-throws and lay-ups! This abnormally tall kid scored most the baskets for the others and he wasn't even good!

To end a long day, Andy took us to his tiny local amongst many of the natives where we enjoyed several beers and a variety of nuts. A local lad assembled into different compartments before putting them into a paper tray for us to enjoy....was nice. Cath made a lovely tomato pasta for tea!