More about my house and the surrounding area

As requested by my friend Gail, here are a few more photos of the inside of my house and the surrounding area. 

This is the kitchen and an important item of equipment, the water filter. Every day we need to boil several large pans of water and then filter the boiled water through limestone elements. Boiling kills bugs and filtering removes the muck and debris. 

 

 Here is my bedroom. It is small but I have made it cosy. VSO supply a very hard pillow and a couple of blankets but we had to buy curtains and bedding from the local market which involved a great deal of haggling.

 

My house is surrounded by more gated compounds and a few schools and colleges. In front of this area is a piece of waste ground where goats are tended. Further on there is the main road called Haile Gebre Selassie Road. This road is the main thoroughfare which runs from west to east and leads out of the city to Debre Birhan, Mekele and Asmara. 

My address is Haile Gebre Selassie Road, opposite N.O.C Filling Station in front of the Megenagna Clinic. The house is about half a kilometre from the main road but most roads do not have a name and houses are not numbered. If you want to get mail you need to set-up a PO Box. The general confusion is compounded by the fact the government recently decided to rename 52 of the city's roads after each of the non Ethiopian member states of the Organisation of African Unity.