As soon as our car got sorted out, our attention focussed on making our house more comfortable so we finished organizing the furniture, hanged our pictures and unpacked our books, including the few I had managed to find about Ethiopia as there were not the guides you find today.

Regarding Ethiopian animals, I trusted that my great “Field Guide to the Larger Mammals of Africa” by Dorst and Dandelot would do. On birds, the situation was pretty desperate and I spent a small fortune on a copy of Mackworth-Praed and Grant “Birds of Eastern and North Eastern Africa” and I managed to get Urban’s “A Checklist of the Birds of Ethiopia”. Now I needed to use them!

We had been warned that water and electricity in Bedele were erratic. The situation brought back memories of my early days in Uruguay during which there seemed to be a chronic period of austerity that included shortages of all kinds, including power and water. I still remember my mother discussing the latter with her friends and taking sides between those who preferred the absence of water or lack of electricity!

Regarding the electricity, we stocked up candles and got our camping gas lamp ready. Mabel and I agreed that water was more important, so we decided to store some in our bathroom by means of a number of one hundred litre plastic garbage containers that we filled and kept there for that purpose.

At the same time Mabel started her great vegetable garden and regular yogurt-making thanks to a few sachets of culture received from our friend Ranjini in the UK that, several times, came to our rescue. Yogurt with honey became a house “special” and I still wonder why no such thing is available commercially! We also learnt that green mangoes, very abundant in Bedele, were a great substitute for the impossible to get apples and Mabel excelled in making green mango strudel to the delight of ourselves and invited neighbours and those that dropped by following the amazing smell.

I focussed on the bird life and set up a number of high hanging plates where seeds were always on offer for those birds that wished to visit them. Immediately we got a positive response from the firefinches and waxbills that kept coming despite the anxious looks of our Siamese cat!

Not all was pleasure though. There came a day when the water heater packed up and, in the absence of a maintenance service in the laboratory, I took it apart and discovered that it was almost full of mud. Through a series of washings that took quite a while, I pushed the mud out and ended up with a functional appliance once again, to the satisfaction of Mabel.

Unfortunately I was less effective with our septic tank. The device kept getting blocked with the same frequency as I needed to write project progress reports! I was nominated the responsible person on account of being a vet and therefore used to some unpleasantness… I soon discovered the meaning of those metal trapdoors around the house. This was not my favourite pastime as it meant to open them up and unblock the pipes for things to move along! With the passing ofthe months, practice made me quite good at it but unfortunately the heavy rainy season did not help.

The onset of the rains would be announced by a gradual accumulation of clouds over a few days and then heavy rain would come and immediately we realized that our concern with water shortages was somehow exaggerated. With about 1.8 metres of yearly rain, water was in great abundance for about six months of the year. This required work on the garden drainage to avoid the water entering the house.

The noise of the rain on our tin roof did not let us listen to our music and, when electric storms came, the lightning and thunder that we experienced were the worse we have ever gone through, even when Harare is tough on this too!

Somewhere I had learnt, the probably incorrect fact, that to know where a lightning bolt has landed you started counting when you saw it until you hear the thunder and the number gave you the distance in kilometres from your position. I tried this in Bedele and I could never count more than two! I stopped as it only increased my sense of vulnerability, particularly when I did not see any lightning rods around!

It was in Bedele and the surrounding area that I learnt what car winches were for! The rains would transform our laboratory compound in a quagmire and often we needed 4WD to get out of it and to drive around the town, particularly to reach our butcher as I described.

It was on a rainy evening that the water finally got to us. It did not come through our door or through a leaking roof but from our bathroom. We were sitting reading quietly when we heard a loud noise and then saw a wall of water about 50cm high coming towards us! Taken totally by surprise we had time for nothing except getting our feet wet but, of course, our cats watched the events from the table.

One of our large garbage containers (not really for that use) that had another one on top of it, had cracked. The one on top also fell and knocked the one next to it. The result was that about three hundred litres of water were violently released in a mini tsunami! It took us until 2 am to wipe our house free of water.

After such a shocking incident and seeing the way it would rain, we decided that we no longer needed to store so much water and we made do with only one of the containers and we survived without having to open it until when, before departing we emptied it.