I don’t think it is traditional practice, but draws inspiration from the continued and accepted custom of kidnapping girls either for child brides or domestic servants or both.

One girl was sold into marriage by her family when she was five, her husband gallantly waited until she was nine to take her virginity.

Early marriages and kidnappings are just two of the many reasons why girls do not reach the same academic level as boys in Ethiopia.

Cynically I’m guessing it’s so they know where not to throw the grenades.

One was lobbed into a meeting of an opposition party in the South East.

Addis has been pretty quiet so far, apart from a minor disturbance at the university which left 24 students injured.

Polling day is the 23rd May.

Thankfully, as I haven’t quite mastered the how to get out of being fined spiel, he was asking whether I wanted to get to the other side and stepped out and stopped the traffic for me so that I could cross without the usual fear of a massive bus mowing me down.

A taxi driver carried my housemate from the cab into her bed after she’d had one too many local gins (80% proof – so it’s not surprising that drinking it straight will knock you out). In London there is absolutely no way that she would have even been allowed in a taxi.

Sadly the Ethiopian Electrical Power company, who I once held in high regard because they have a 24 hour call out service, and they did fix the coat hanger that connected our house to the mains supply late one night, has now publicly admitted that it has no control over the power cuts which we had all thought they were carefully coordinating.

Which may be why there was a cholera, sorry, acute watery diarrhoea outbreak in the city at the end of last summer.

And as if to prove a point, the highlight of my week was seeing a woman weeing in the street.

Meanwhile CCTV cameras have gone up in all the main squares of the city.

Hmm more toilets or CCTV?

Current shortages in no particular order

• foreign currency
• concrete
• sugar (this is a good thing, as my sugar habit is reaching habesha proportions)
• oh and electricity

There’s no water to make the electricity (all of Ethiopia’s power supply comes from hydroelectricity) therefore there is no concrete, because you need electricity to make concrete.

Ethiopia does not produce enough sugar to meet domestic demand.

The country does not export enough flowers, coffee and leather to bring in the foreign currency needed to buy the products that they are in short supply of.

Hence the continuing lack of concrete and the rationing of sugar, which can now only be bought from government fruit shops.

There is a dispute as to the causes of the deaths, current causes of choice a) murder b) death by bar brawl or c) a natural demise.

The Communications Minister’s response “He was sick and he died, the opposition is smearing the campaign, using any person who is dead for their own purposes”.

The ruling party spoke for what seemed like an uninterrupted hour while the opposition party representatives only got five minutes each to say hello.

Legislation was passed by the current government which means that in any televised debate the ruling party has at least half the airtime of the broadcast devoted to them.

I can’t help but think that there must also be a clause in this legislation that compels the opposition parties to take part, otherwise why would they agree to it?

It doesn’t make it difficult to decide who you’re meant to vote for.

To comfort me I was told that I was lucky to be able to worry about such things, because children in Africa wouldn’t have time to, they would be too busy thinking about where their next meal was coming from.

Which does make sense given Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – hats off to my parents for enabling a precocious existential crisis.

But I still wonder if it’s true. The little children in the mountains here spend whole days on their own watching the cows, goats and sheep.

They are unlikely to have many books at home, they mights see some television when they visit the local town for market day, someone they live with might have a radio. In comparison to the western world it is nothing.

Where their food comes from plays a much more important part in their life than it did in mine as a 10 year old nagging for pop tarts and alphabet potatoes, but they have so much time to think, much more than I ever did, they must think about more than just food.

In the cafe there’s a raffia fence that divides the main seating area and the couple of metres to the concrete boundary wall. I could hear voices behind the fence and wondered why anyone would choose to sit there.

“Well you know it’s still not acceptable to kiss your boyfriend or girlfriend in public”.

So it’s normal for a restaurant or a cafe to have a secret place to sit where other people can’t see you.

It explains the odd layout of a few restaurants, what I had thought were badly conceived extensions; corridors tacked on to eating areas, that look cold and uninviting are meant to be there for romantic assignations.

It’s because the streets turn into mud, and any road with a slight gradient (which is the majority in Addis) becomes a river of untreated sewage.

It’s because a rain coat and an umbrella are not enough to keep you dry.

Twice I’ve been rescued by my housemate when I’ve been stuck in the pouring rain. Once I had taken refuge in the closest hotel after running through torrents of poo with a newspaper hat on. The other I was wading up a hill hoping not to be washed away.

I was concerned about contracting cholera through my feet via osmosis. Thankfully I’ve been assured that this is not possible, but advised not to lick my feet unless I have washed them thoroughly.