Sierra Leone in September 2008...

Smiling and serene Hannah Alpha deftly works her sewing machine, fresh out of school and looking without a care in the world.
Hard to believe that just a few years ago she was a drug-crazed, laughing killer – before even becoming a teenager.
Hannah was one of the child soldiers not only affected by, but thrust into battle during the West African country’s 11-year civil war.
Britain’s eventual intervention in the gruesome conflict remains, unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, a Tony Blair military adventure generally approved by consensus.
And the likes of Hannah – survivors, though still scarred both physically and emotionally – are grateful for the progress brought by peace.
Prosperity, by contrast, may still be a distant dream – aid volunteers here express mild pride about the year Sierra Leone rose a place in the United Nations’ Human Development Index.
That is, off rock bottom.
But no amount of UN peacekeeping troops or pledges of Western – or, increasingly, Chinese – investment can quite cleanse Hannah’s mind of those horrific memories.
Above all, she is haunted by the day she found himself gunning down a wailing elderly woman in a neighbouring village.
Like many child soldiers – some as young as six – Hannah had been doped up on cocaine by her kidnappers, rebel militia backed by neighbouring Liberia and plotting to overthrow the Sierra Leonean government.
Some, like Hannah, were force-fed the drug – others had the powder smeared into freshly-cut wounds stretched across their faces.
Hannah, now 18 but only 11 at the time, said: ‘When I was on the drug, I just didn’t see people as human beings any more – they were more like just chickens running around.
‘I shot an old woman in her hut – as she was struggling, fighting to stay alive or to die, I was just laughing. I thought it was just a joke.’
Often the rebel fighters – led by wedding photographer-turned-guerilla Foday Sankoh – would force the captives to kill their own relatives.
The rampaging troops, backed in return for diamonds by Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, burnt down villages, decapitated tribal chiefs, raped women and looted homes.
Hannah’s parents were slaughtered by rebels who stormed the key district of Kailahun, the area where the war had first erupted in 1991.
The eastern region is perhaps Sierra Leone’s most remote and forbidding, with ditches and rough terrain substituting for roads through dense, swampy jungle.
But its position just miles from borders with Guinea and Liberia offered Revolutionary United Front fighters handy bases from which to stir up support and launch ambushes.
Hannah recalled: ‘Both my parents were captured and killed.
‘I was left to drift between different relatives until the rebels came to take me away.
‘I was only about ten but they used to gang-rape me, and threatened to do away with me if I didn’t join them.
‘For about three years I was bearing a gun, a rifle.’
She was part of frequent raids on villages in the east of the country, looting for food and ammunition – and occasionally compelled to kill.
An awkward peace was finally reached in January 2002, partly thanks to the arrival of up to 16,000 UN peacekeepers – including 400 Britons, patrolling the capital Freetown.
But a nation-wide programme called DDR – disarmament, demobilization and reintegration – concentrated mainly on adult ex-fighters, ignoring many of the estimated 23,000 child soldiers and sex slaves.
The Red Cross, both in Britain and Sierra Leone, has been keen to set up Child Advocacy and Rehabilitation (CAR) centres across the country for 14 to 18-year-olds.
These offer literacy lessons, training and apprenticeships, and counselling – as well as continuing support for older adults.
Hannah has been one of the beneficiaries – but only having suffered several more traumatic years, even after peace was declared.
With no home or family to which she could return, she drifted into prostitution with friends desperate for any way to scrape a living.
Only a chance meeting with a long-time family friend introduced her to the CAR centre in the town of Kailahun – one of four the Red Cross runs, with plans for a fifth.
Tailoring lessons have given Hannah a new skills – and new hope for a future career.
Her wartime trauma still lingers – and one of the rapes left her with a baby daughter later seized from her and still missing.
Many of the teenage women enjoying cookery, carpentry, dancing or dress-making sessions with the Red Cross are accompanied by their own young ‘bush-babies’, the products of rape.
Youngsters who were attacked or saw their own relatives murdered in the war now find themselves mingling with those, like Hannah, who actually carried out killings.
But she insisted: ‘I try not to think about the things that happened, or the things I’ve done.
‘I was afraid for a while that a few people who were victims might see me now and be angry.
‘The woman I killed was from just a few villages away.
‘I think about her still sometimes – especially when I’m alone.
‘But at least I now have good work, which is helping me survive. I’m very, very happy about that.
‘The change in attitude and the skills I’ve learned – these are the two things in life that now please me most.’

Sierra Leoneans refer to their country’s bloody 11-year civil war using a creole word, ‘palava’.
If that sounds slightly comical and under-stated to English ears, then survivors’ reminiscences of coming under attack are anything but.
For all the confidently-expressed hopes for future peace, few were left untouched by the conflict and remain wounded physically, emotionally or both.
Victor Lahai still has seared across the back of his right calf the scar left by former friends who turned violently on their own village.
His crime was to refuse their demand he join their band of rebels and help carry looted food, guns and ammunition.
Among the group confronting him were former play-mates with whom he had grown up in the village of Nianoiahun, close to the border with volatile Liberia.
Victor, 24 now but 16 at the time, said: ‘I think the fact they knew me meant they decided not to kill me when I was captured.
‘But when I kept refusing to carry their luggage – or to join up with them, fighting the battle – they said they couldn’t let me go the way they’d found me. ‘That’s when they lay me on the ground and shot off the back of my leg.’
His brothers had earlier urged him to flee to dense surrounding bushland, when the militia first threatened their homes.
Now it was those brothers who came to his aid, the first to find him and carry him to a makeshift hospital.
He spent the rest of the war recuperating in a refuge camp at Gondama, one of several set up across the country to deal with some of the 2million people forced out of their homes.
About 75,000 Sierra Leoneans are thought to have died in the conflict.
Some of those who survived now tell their tales of brave defiance, relying on both luck and judgment to somehow escape with their lives.
John A Koroma, a chief in the southern village of Ngeyawamie, knew the RUF attackers had his name on a hitlist of those to be killed.
But when confronted when fleeing to the bush, he claimed his first name was not John, but Joseph.
Koroma is one of the most popular surnames in Sierra Leone – shared, for example, but current president Ernestr Bai and the RUF-sympathising ex-presuident Major General Johnny Paul.
John Koroma’s ruse worked – the 55-year-old remembered: ‘It was different to the name they had written down – so they let me go.’
Others were not so fortunate – shot or stabbed to death, amputated at the wrists or gang-raped.
Katimu Martin saw her father shot dead, five neighbouring homes burnt down and four people have their hands chopped off when the RUF occupied the southern village of Jombohun.
But she says she dodged a similar fate by daringly shoving aside a gun pointed at her.
The 40-year-old said: ‘My younger brother had urged me not to go outside because there were rebel forces all around.
‘But I didn’t listen. I came out, trying to rush around the house and towards the bush – but they followed me.
‘One of them cocked his gun, ready to fire.
‘I was sure I was about to die – but God gave a different answer. I managed to push the gun away and take the chance to run away.’
Like many escapees, she had to survive in Sierra Leone’s dense, swampy bushland – building vulnerable mudhuts, feeding on yams.
Others in the eastern region made it across the border to sanctuary in Guinea.

The bush provided a precarious safe haven for many of those who escaped RUF punishment.
Now it offers their best chance of survival in peacetime – the subsistence farming that accounts for much of Sierra Leoneans’ meager profits and nutrition.
Despite promises of technology and investment from abroad – increasingly, inevitably, China – agriculture still contributes an estimated 52.5 per cent of national income.
The country’s rich diamond resources may generate immense wealth – but largely for illegal smugglers or the foreign firms buying up mining land but paying native employees pitiful wages.
A cup of rice can sell at market for about 800 Leones, a measly 15p.
Yet this is more than double the price charged at the end of the war – and remains a considerable sum for villagers in a land where the average earning is less than a pound per day.
Red Cross activists estimate that in the southern district of Pujehun, about 50 per cent of children are malnourished.
Katimu Martin, 40, in the Pujehun village of Jombohun, said: ‘We’re no longer angry – just hungry.’
Red Cross projects are helping towns and villages – many left in ruins after rebel attacks – to slowly improve their sanitation, housing and farming prospects.
Gifts of seeds, help running micro-credit schemes and collective funds for emergencies and future harvests are offered by the charity’s Community Animation and Peace Support (CAPS) volunteers.
But rice harvests, integral to the local economy, remains vulnerable, especially during the summer rainy seasons and in the absence of adequate storage.
Sturdy homes, working wells and functioning toilets are also in short supply.
Nyanda Albert, a community leader in southern Ngeyawamie, said: ‘The priority here is a proper seed store.
‘We’ve been using a farmhouse but last year thieves came and easily made away with all the rice.
‘Another season the rains were particularly bad and destroyed all the rice we’d gathered.’
Other key produce includes palm oil, cassava, peanuts and laundry soap.
John A Koroma, chairman of Ngeyawamie’s village council, hopes all 12 of his children will complete their schooling but always remember, ‘whether they go off somewhere else or come back here: ‘agriculture is the backbone of this country’.
He added: ‘No agriculture, no food – so get used to it, I always tell them.
‘Even if you’re sitting in an office, one day you’ll come back home and realise – it’s all agriculture.’
As he said that, the villagers were already trooping out for another long day.
On foot, with tillers, planters and hoes in hand, cooking and storage pots balanced expertly on heads, babies wrapped tight in scarves around backs – back to the bush.

Kailahun is said to be where Sierra Leone’s civil war started – and where, 11 years later, it ended.
But despite six years of peace, the damaging legacy of war still looms over this desolate and poverty-ridden region.
With borders to both Liberia and Guinea, towns and villages in this eastern district were used as key entry points by rebel bands.
Revolutionary United Front forces were not only stirred up, but trained in return for diamonds by Liberian dictator Charles Taylor – now facing war crimes charges at The Hague.
Sierra Leone’s ruling All People’s Congress party was widely accused of corruption, but rival parties were repulsed by many of the RUF’s violent tactics – which included gang-rape, amputation and murder.
The rebels’ first ambushes were carried out in Kailahun district on March 23, 1991, ushering in 11 years of violence, instability and coups.
Ismail Foday, a senior tribal chief in Kailahun, said: ‘We still call it a senseless war – these rebels kept fighting, even when the original government was overthrown.
‘Our young boys are still suffering now – and I still don’t know why they got embroiled.
‘The rebels used to force cocaine into wounds on their face, pasting it into plasters, and turning these boys into bad men.
‘If told to go and tamper with their own mothers, they would do it.
‘But even after the war finally ended, there were very little help for them – many didn’t take the six-month demobilization period very seriously.
‘And those children returning from were left neglected and desperate.
‘We had gangs of thieves running rampant, and teenage prostitutes everywhere – girls on sale at 1,000 Leones (19p) for five minutes.
‘It was extremely difficult for us to control such behaviour.’
The arrival of the Red Cross and its Child Advocacy and Rehabilitation (CAR) centre in Kailahun has at least offered 150 children each year much-needed assistance.
They attend daily for literacy and numeracy classes, training in trades such as cookery, carpentry and tailoring, plus intensive trauma counselling.
Some of these pupils are former child soldiers – attending alongside others whose relatives were murdered by rebel invaders, or young girls who were raped.
Current pupil Lamin Brima, 18, still finds it difficult to forget or to forgive.
He vividly remembers the day his father, a town chief, was publicly executed after having his name called by RUF soldiers in Kailahun.
He himself managed to flee safely to Liberia, but now attends CAR clases alongside youngsters he knows may well have carried out rebel atrocities.
‘I know some of them now – when I see them it’s difficult not to feel angry again, because of the attacks they committed.’
Two-thirds of youths in Sierra Leone are thought to be unemployed, while persistent government corruption and the growing involvement of Latin American drug cartels also cause concern.
Mr Foday acknowledged: ‘This area is one deeply-populated by people drastically affected by the war.
‘But every time I now go to the CAR centre, I feel so much happier for Kailahun and its future.’

Tony Blair and Britain are seen as a significantly mixed blessing in the eyes of Sierra Leoneans.

Gratitude for the UK-dominated UN incursion that finally defeated and disarmed rebel militia is tempered by dismay at the perceived lateness of their arrival.

And a fellow-feeling based on historic national ties with Sierra Leone’s former colonial rulers is soured by misgivings about the abruptness of Britain’s withdrawal in 1961.

Sierra Leone’s renowned educational bases – including a university where Mr Blair’s father used to teach – won the country a reputation as ‘the Athens of Africa’.

But the disruption and devastation caused by the 11-year civil war ruined the country’s already-declining economy and infrastructure.

A UN-led force of 6,000 peacekeepers finally arrived in late 1999, eight years after fighting began – soon rising to 11,000 and 13,000.

An earlier collection of Nigerian-led ECOMOG troops had enjoyed only limited success against rebel forces trained and supported by Liberian president Charles Taylor.

The UN peacekeepers successfully claimed back occupied regions and disarmed Revolutionary United Force fighters in 2001, with peace declared in January 2002.

But Sierra Leone Red Cross co-ordinator Victor Fornah said: ‘Britain’s intervention was seen by many as too little, too late.

‘And there was certainly disappointment that efforts were only led in the first place by a small country like Nigeria.

‘But of course, overall, the move was welcomed – Britain had to mend some bridges, and did.’

He suggested Britain should have given more prominence to local leaders before handing Sierra Leone its independence in 1961 – then left more support in place, rather than remaining aloof.

President Siaka Stevens, who served from 1967 to 1985, was widely accused of human rights abuses such as rigging elections, corruption, suppressing independent media and executing political rivals.

But Mr Fornah added: ‘Sierra Leoneans feel especially pleased and reassured by the Queen’s promise that if any future coups are threatened, a British back-up force will be ready for action within 72 hours.’

And wartime survivor Katimu Martin revealed: ‘I only started getting over my fear of the war starting over again when I would see foreigners coming into our country.

‘They’re helping us and interacting – they’re interested in us.

‘It shows where we’re getting to, with the help of charities like the Red Cross – with that, we’re pretty sure there will no longer be war, just peace.’

Mr Blair visited Sierra Leone several times – and the second city, Bo, now boasts a school named the Tony Blair International Academy, which opened last month.

The former prime minister already had a family connection to the country – his father Leo used to lecture at the capital Freetown’s Fourah Bay College.

The university, founded in 1827, is the oldest in West Africa and a major influence in building Sierra Leone’s historic reputation for academic excellence.

English remains the country’s official language, used in schools and on radio – Sierra Leone’s most popular form of media.

But most of the population speak variations of Krio, a creole language containing shreds of recognisable English – the most commonly-used greeting is not ‘How are you?’, but ‘Ow di bohdi?’

Seville disorder...

(Surprisingly, this wasn't the most troubling sight of the stay...)

So. This entry should, and still could really, have been mostly about the strange and beautiful bonding of English guests and Spanish hosts - for a start, in the makeshift, central "Fans' Zone" offering free paella and at least free-flowing beer, tucked respectfully away from the cramped alleyways down which Jesus and mother Mary models glided upon the shoulders of multi-coloured KKKesque outfits, and with which no perfectly-distracted-anyway-thank-you football fan had any idea of interfering.

Or else, elsewhere, when despite - or due to - the Chas and Dave CDs being on constant rotation, the cheery if beery Tottenham boys and girls and old men and young kids would drift into outlying districts. With maybe a word here or there from helpful, Betis-sympathetic taxi drivers - invariably veering towards those healthily, patiently bustling tasteful and tasty tapas cafes, where hale-and-hearty owners and dainty-figured, friendly-faced, wide-eyed and charcoal-eyelined serving-girls helped while away waiting-times for seats with handy towers of cheese platters and, well, wine, plenty and purple of it.

Or, perhaps, let's lurch into the alarming, disarmingly charming Semana Santa parades striding through those identikit streets - if "streets" is not too generous a word for some of the cobbled backyards they somehow slunk within and around. Frighteningly intense, that fervor with which those sturdy-yet-fragile-looking figurines were hoisted, pursued by kids in their Maundy Thursday best: young and old, very old women wearing black lace mantillas hardly-complementing above-knee skirts, surprisingly-low-cut tops and more suitable, severely towering headpieces.

And those outfits... Sorry, even knowing they have a historic significance entirely unrelated to how such apparel has been hijacked by the Grand High Wizards and their weird brigades, these could have looked for all the world like Ku Klux Klan rallies, were not the all-whites just one representative of the spectrum: pale violet, pink, ecclesiastical green or crimson were also liable to abruptly arrive around another corner.

After about two hours' sleep in two days, even these bleary eyes couldn't be rubbed raw enough to fully appreciate today's pre-proper-sunrise, 6am sight of those all-in-black pointy heads cheered on by carnivalesque crowds swarming the dim streets, all accompanied by a pungent scent of incense and the almost-menacing soundtrack of thuddering drums.

Ah, all this and much more.

But, ah yes, the unfortunate, the inevitable subject that seems to have dominated the headlines back home (though seemed strangely absent, at all, from the Spanish Press coverage).

Yes, the sheer audacity of Spurs fans booing that laughable penalty decision and thus clearly provoking, indeed inviting, the bombarding charge of baton-swinging riot police, brutally coshing most startled supporters into fleeing desperately higher along the already-steep and stifling stands...

The police raiders swiping out at all, whether wheelchair-bound or assisting, even thumping the Sevilla and Spurs stewards who had been coping with and calming the crowds perfectly well alone, thankyou. Note, no Sevilla supporters came under threat or in any contact with Tottenham fans. The only things exchanged between the two sets of fans all day were warm words, replica shirts and memorabilia.

Of course, there were Tottenham idiots in the mix too, tossing seats and fighting back whether under direct attack or not. But most were simply scared. Thankfully, being a little higher and out of harm's way, consensus among the many looking on in dismay and disappointment and frustration suggested such a hideous over-reaction with consequent effects.Here, for example, a little unnecessary police brutality - out of proportion and out of the blue. What were these goons actually doing there, and just where might the closest far-distant Sevilla supporter actually be?

And coming just 24 hours after the ugly scenes at the Roma-Manchester United match, the telling "coincidence" seems not to be the involvement of English fans as the merely-guilty parties, but the inadequacies of a clobber-now-evade-questions-later police strategy you thankfully don't see being called upon at games in England. Hm, now there's an idea...

In fact, for all the valiant efforts of the stewards, there had been a little anxiety on entering the stadium at the blithe instructions to visiting fans, regardless of the seat and stand number on their tickets, to merely: "Sit anywhere, anywhere you like, doesn't matter."

Maybe that's what it was like in the good old days, but it does seem a strange and ominous approach for a high-profile, Uefa fixture, leading an imbalance between the crowding of upper tiers and lower tiers - and, of course, a recipe for at the very least unpleasantness when combined with the boys in black's rather more antagonistic approach.

Well, well, that's quite enough for now - other than to be grateful it didn't turn out significantly worse. As for the game itself, before the baton battalions got stuck in, and after they mysteriously disappeared at half-time, it was all very entertaining. Our players did appear at least partly affected by the simultaneous storm in the stands, that 25 minutes before half-time our most nervous and sloppy.

But the players rallied well after the break, looked the more likely than Seville to score and certainly posed enough problems for the home defence - the marauding, albeit diving, Daniel Alves on the right aside - to whet all appetites, especially Keane's and Berbatov's, for next Thursday night at White Hart Lane.

And the memory, the moment of celebrating that opening goal will linger a long time - even if the thrill was tempered a little by the abrupt realisation of just how stomach-lurchingly steep those terraces could feel beneath the bouncing feet...

All things considered, when personally revisiting these recollections, best to simply go back to the very beginning, a very good place to start.

And stay.
And simply celebrate those heroes among Sevillans.

Hod fuzz...

Concentration on the new Wembley was diverted a little by this rather alarming photo, contained in Saturday's Under-21s official programme:

And there was me thinking the young Glenn could barely muster a wispy excuse for a moustache to make Gary Neville's look Merv Hughes-esque.

Presumably this picture was taken before some kindly soul told Hoddle that Chas and Dave were fine for FA Cup Final songs,

but not - repeat NOT - for personal grooming advice.

"And they got up to sing a few old country songs..."

RIP "Sneaky" Pete Kleinow.

The Flying Burrito Brothers' Gilded Palace Of Sin and Burrito Deluxe may not quite be my two favourite albums of all-time, but they'd certainly both make it into the, ooh, I dunno - top seven, top eight?
You certainly can't buy a better "two-fer", both classic country-rock LPs (in a good way, honest, not an Eaglesque atrocity - actually, make that the Gram-approved "cosmic American music"...)
Ah, actually, maybe you can - Gram Parsons' own GP and Grievous Angel, put together without the Burritos but with his astonishing new protege, Emmylou Harris, probably the finest accompanying vocalist around and heartbreaking on such ballads as "Love Hurts" and "We'll Sweep Out The Ashes In The Morning". Last year's reissue, with alternative, discarded session tracks, throws up a fair few gems - including a long-lost, third Gram take on his personal anthem, "Hickory Wind", perfectly balanced between the chugalug of the Byrds original and the Gram/Emmylou, officially-released, slightly-too-slow fake-"live" re-recording...

But anyway, anyway... there was one "one-fer" that not only got me to those, but perhaps directly and indirectly introduced me to more intriguing, enjoyable highways and byways of music than any other.

And a place I suppose I should thank, in starting me off on this life-changing musical journey.
Yes, Dudley.

I'm sure the Merry Hill Shopping Centre in Wolverhampton's less glamorous little brother borough has been the host of oh-so-many minor and major epiphanies, it's untrue...

But while we're waiting for those, here's an actual one: it was in Our Price there that one day I finally took the plunge and, after years of teenage guilt and longing and lusting after that dirty secret that is country music, I tugged a copy of the Byrds' Sweetheart Of The Rodeo to my chest, darted for the check-out and hurled the £8.99 across the counter without making any guilty eye contact at all with the cashier.

Actually, I'd weighed this up well. I'd heard the briefest echoes of pedal-steel guitars while enduring lifts home from school from my John-Dunn-adoring, Radio-2-tuning mother. And even once borrowed a Patsy Cline album from the local library, stowing it secretly under my school jumper through that vulnerable five-minute walk home...

But then again, I did have the Byrds' (latest) Greatest Hits album on tape, b/w another library-copy - Star by Belly. And that jingle-jangle... well, it was sort-of like the Pete Seeger songs my Dad would play in church every so hip-pily often, but not at all.

So I finally bought Sweetheart, and nudged it alongside the Sixties albums I'd been hoarding since the age of, er, seven (mostly the holy trinity of Beatles, Kinks and, er, Donovan). But if ever an album could (ahem) change my life, then Sweetheart... was it.

Because within, ooh, a week I'd bought that GP/Grievous Angel double-set and, greedily, the equally-convenient Gilded Palace Of Sin/Burrito Deluxe Burrito Brothers, er, deluxe set.

And then started to both read and listen up... and find, gradually, both the confidence and knowledge to branch into modern-day Americana, classic Sixties country soul, pure old-fashioned country, pure old-fashioned rockabilly, heart-tugging ballads, nigh-on-impenetrable 18th century American folk songs, rock'n'gospel...

And no, these weren't mostly Gram-led, he was brilliantly-limited, but the lesser-hailed McGuinn blazed a fair few trails even as he shed inspirational and members and cushioned lovely Byrds singles between early-Seventies album filler...

But just as The Kinks Are The Village Green Society lives long as a great, great counter-culture 1968 album, so does Sweetheart....

A recent reissue appended a radio ad, which either made light of or ignored the peak chart position of about 63... but the relevance remains. And adds to the experimentation already heard on Younger Than Yesterday (and Hillman's first country-shuffling tracks), or Mr Tambourine Man (and the harsher-edged jangles on the bonus track alternate versions) or the pastoral laments of "John Riley" or "Purple Heather" up against LSD-astronaut-noodlings...

And I haven't even mentioned Gene Clark's solo beauties either - here's perhaps the finest pop song... (the dancing's not so bad either)

So, country music/country&western/alt-country/Americana/'No Depression'/bluegrass/rockabilly/country-soul/cosmic-American-music - whatever you might want to call it, there's plenty there to be getting on with, redeeming, and relishing. Sure, a good deal of shlock, too...

But thank you, Byrds and Burritos, for giving me - ooh, off the top of the head - Johnny Cash, Uncle Tupelo, Hank Williams, Emmylou, Loretta, Tammy, Bobbie and Dolly, The Jayhawks, Neko Case, Lucinda Williams, George Jones, Laura Cantrell, Merle Haggard, Wilco, Kasey Chambers, Jimmie Rodgers, Iris DeMent, Vern Gosdin, Steve and Stacey Earle, Jim White, Ryan Adams... Ooh, even a bit of Shania every now and then (even if she does have a weakness for a few too many exclamation marks.)


Oh, and of course, the divine Lurleen - the girl who was "going to be a country music superstar, like - er, that jerk in the cowboy hat - and that dead lady!"

(cont., ending)
Friday, November 17th. 12.30pm, in the air above Ethiopia.

“P.M.T.C.T, find out what it means to me…” – my suggestion for an Aretha Franklin-voiced Christmas single to promote Tearfund’s campaign for better “Prevention of Mother To Child Transmission” services...

A silly joke (always my favourite kind), but perhaps unusually this trip – now ending – has been studded with them, apparently flippant but necessary reflex responses to such otherwise-overwhelming despair.

An opinion poll reported on the front of yesterday’s Daily Monitor suggests seven out of ten children remain happy and positive in eight of Africa’smost crushingly deprived nations, Ethiopia of course included. Despite the abject poverty, it’s easy to believe of the irrepressibly eager kids all around.

But it’s a challenging context in which to guiltily glibly speak of “happy”, or at least “happier”, stories. Our re-visit to the Addis Ababa Medan Acts compound yesterday brought us face to face with two more HIV-positive (maybe the sole circumstance in which being “positive” is such a negative) – each tugging along their children, yet only one of the mothers consoled by their child’s health.

In one sense, 35-year-old Shewaye Hailu’s is the “happy” story, as her carefully-timed 200mg dose of Neviraprine during labour effectivelv shielded daughter Lydia from a deadly inheritance – the three-and-a-half-year-old girl now plays with ten-year-old brother Nathaniel, both (sorry, for now) unclouded by infection themselves.

But for all Shewaye’s relief and apparent tranquillity, she remains HIV+ herself, not yet severely-affected enough for ARV treatment but perhaps not far off. Hers, of course, is yet another distressing narrative – long detached from the husband of her first child, a hypocritical church elder who refused to accept any later involvement; probably infected by her cheating, previously-married husband who still refuses to be tested despite his telltale sinking bones and blistered flesh yet continued to force unsafe sex upon her until she finally walked out.

But, having planted between four and nine kisses upon each of us as greeting, she shrugs off any suggestion of being angry at her own fate – or her God – and instead talks up her prospects both working as a cleaner, and selling wheat and vegetable oil thanks to grants in cash and in kind from the helpers here.

It could have been rather different, however: “If my child had beeninfected because of me, I couldn’t have been able to cope with the stress and the agony. I couldn’t have survived this far – I’d have died some time back. The help I received is the source of my own survival as well as my daughter’s.”

How deep, then, must be the pain 25-year-old Mulumebet Bereket endures, even as her two-year-old daughter Tsion runs, plays, hollers, squeals, munches seriously on a handed-out Frusli bar, as the globular blisters sit like tears down the little girl’s cheeks.

Mulumebet, aware of her HIV status, had assiduously taken the 200mg pill as she began labour in her home, but was unable to keep the pill down, then was unable on arriving at hospital to explain to the medics she needed a replacement dose in time.

Tsion was born on the reception room floor – and, sure enough, passed the virus, the latest heartrending setback in a life that began with Mulumebet never knowing her separated parents; brought up, until the age of ten, by an older sister, but hurled out of home when said sister died; bumped from one unhappy, bullying home to another, and another, before even reaching her teens, as she struggled to find lasting work as a maidservant; forced into an affair with one employer, resulting in now-sombre five-year-old Mikias, born at 10am one morning only for his father to have fled by 3pm; persecuted by neighbours whenever lucky enough to find an all-briefly-rented room; often forced to spend days on the street without a scrap of food; brought to the brink of hanging herself with carefully-prepared noose and platform only for a timely neighbour to happen by her home...

Yet her stately, voluble storytelling has us flagging at the horror, more than it seems to affect her - the least we can offer are a fair few dollars for some of the handsome green-crossed, embroidered tablecloths and smocks she proudly spreads across the Medan Acts meeting-room tables.

The tributes to the Medan medics come not just from the patients/worshippers - it seems they have absolute faith placed in them by the appropriate authorities - both regional and federal.
Dr Fikir Melesse, the paediatrician in charge of the family department at the regional ministry of health, reveals all 31 HIV area projects in the capital are now under the control of Medan and a handful of other church-spearheaded NGOs - the politicians and officials seemingly satisfied retiring to the sidelines, especially after a pilot partnership with Intrahealth proved insubstantial to all and dropped after the obligatory year.

Amid the expected bureaucratic waffle, the mistiness of “priorities” and “strategies” and “objectives”, the good doctor does admit ignorance of how much exactly the state had invested into HIV healthcare - but also sighs ruefully, sharply: “You can’t imagine the discrepancy between, say, agriculture and health budgeting - we’re low down, put it like that...”

She also seems frustrated by both their dependence on outside intervention, and its limits - the lack of an effective co-ordinated response to the twin debilitators of HIV and food shortages, albeit expressed accompanied by a slightly startling image: “Malnutrition is the most important issue in an urban setting like Addis. People have nothing to do, nothing to eat, they have no blankets, so they start to make love - and have more children. What we want to see is both tackling HIV and at the same time combating malnutrition. Something too often we’re not even trying to alleviate. There are attempts here and there, even [even?] by Unicef, but at the moment I don’t think that’s anywhere near enough for Addis.”

So - more food, more donations, are needed - but surely, too, better focus and organisation? Often the problem - problems - have looked so vast and forbidding, any response is bound to look a little futile by comparison. But these lesser or greater acts of compassion and practical help, as seemingly exemplified by the likes of Dr Henok and the Medan teams, at least act against some of the all-too-easy cynicism.

It seemed hard to believe, but even the ever-beaming Dr Henok the other day admitted to a brief, recent attack of despair and foreboding, as the full implications of enforced changes to the PMTCT drug regimes began to dawn. Recent studies have shown up alarming limits in the efficacy of the 200mg single doses - only thought now to have, at best, a 50 per cent chance of preventing infection and, as Mulumebet’s plight illustrated, subject to grim mischance. Now, a two-pronged approach will combine Naviroprine with one of several specialist combination treatments - to be prescribed once a day for the final 60 days of pregnancy, and for a further month after birth.

Dr Henok and his old college comrade Dr Melesse are optimistic about the improved chances of success - but the estimated cost of administering to each mother, from the January 2007 changeover, will soar from $10 to $90. Tearfund’s choice of Christmas appeal has just become, perhaps quite unexpectedly, even more worthy and needful...

(The less said, perhaps the better, about our final, anti-climactic encounter of the week, and our second with a supposedly relevant Government official - a hapless number-cruncher and IT assist in the federal ministry of health who, beyond insisting mortality rates were “getting better” albeit without the assistance of specifics, seemed apologetically incapable of sharing any figures at all, or opinions - save for explaining his sideline work of chairing the new “health infomatics association”, only to dry up, baffled, when I straightforwardly, maybe a little sarcastically, asked him how this would actually affect a suffering, struggling individual with HIV. Dr Henok did come to his - and our - rescue by entirely reasonably pointing out the benefits of computerised, comparative data, file-taking, checks and tests-recording, and on and dully-but-worthily-if-belatedly on...)

This is where I left off scribbling, on the flight home last Friday, my eyelids clamming shut and “The Devil Wears Prada” about to start up for the second time… telling myself I could come back to this in between scrawling and typing up, and produce a finer, more thoughtful and climactic conclusion. Sadly, I couldn’t and haven’t and won’t, having no doubt been self-indulgent and turgid enough so far. On returning to work, it’s been tricky to know just how to respond to the inevitable questions of “How was Ethiopia, then?”m guessing the interrogator is neither expecting a breezy “Great, thanks!”, nor wanting a lengthy, agonised description… So far, I’ve resolved to stick with such thus-far-and-no-further, yet still a little emotive, terms as “Fascinating”, “Intriguing” and “Eye-opening”.

Maybe even a humble “Humbling”.

And it was, all those things and many more. Now to batter these overwritten ramblings into something approaching concise common sense by Friday week, World Aids Day…

The End.
For now...

(cont.)

Thursday, November 16th, 2006. 7.10pm. Hotel Desalegn, Addis Ababa.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, as our last evening in Addis Ababa looms, I sit in a hotel room suffused with the overpowering aroma of rich Ethiopian coffee – four 500g bags of roasted, one 500g bag of ready-to-cafetiere ground coffee, this blend apparently dubbed "God’s urine" and bought the intoxicating coffee emporium of local providers Tomoca. Now all I and my Christmas gift beneficiaries need is a grinder...

A kilo costs 41 Birr – about £2.50, and about what you’d pay for a bland mere mug back home in Starbucks or Costa Coffee or wherever, places that have always irritated me – especially, selfishly, at the thought of credulous customers spending so much on a cup, while nevertheless complaining about the slightest price rise among much more valuable-for-money newspapers…
Dr Henock was astonished, even more justly, to hear of such places – coffee farmers among his Addis congregation sell their finest flavours for just 4 Birr, or 25p, per kilo. Perhaps a fair trade opportunity in the import-export market is here for the cultivating...

For some illuminating overviews of the city slums, we were taken to the tenth floor of a rather sleazy-feeling hotel – dubiously relying on a creaky, cranking, doorless, doorless dizzy-making lift. On eventual arrival at the top, there appeared to be little to see this side of the hazy mountains, between the brutal useless towerblocks - just desolate wastelands of tin sheeting.

Except then, there are appeared a few flickers of miniscule movement in the crevices – peering more carefully, I could just about pick out laundry-hauling housewives, ball-chasing children, scraggy mangy dogs. Of course, these were the shanty "civilisations" beneath the metal sheeting, stretching as slums, as one, across the city sprawl. And still Addis keeps spreading – not vertically, as the Government planners might desire, but horizontally – ever wider, yet always looked down upon.

(cont.)

Wednesday, November 15th. 9.40pm. Hotel Desalegn, Addis Adaba.
Coffee courses through Ethiopia like lifeblood, rich and reinvigorating. Solomon claims the country gave coffee to the world, hence the region now named Kofa. It certainly seems to play an even most essential, characteristic role in daily life than does a cup of good old English tea back home.

Coffee is the country’s second main export, behind only oil – and Ethiopia is now the leading coffee producer on the continent, with exports up from 95,000 tonnes in 1991 to 146,000 tonnes 12 years later. Now, as well as satisfying – then again stimulating – a thirst, coffee may even be easing some of the suffering – and divisions – wreaked by the HIV epidemic.

We had already been struck by the strength – and sumptuous, spicy flavour – of Ethiopian coffee, as served at and after every meal or meeting, and urged Solomon to help us find and buy plenty of freshly-ground to take home for presents and personal indulgence. He should know his coffee beans – after all, he has been drinking the stuff since the age of three.

But this morning in Nazareth we got to take part – albeit tentatively, tangentially – in the time-honoured tradition of the Ethiopian coffee ceremony, this one with a twist, Apparently, to drink coffee entirely alone is seen as a grievous anti-social offence. Instead, people habitually gather, often in a specified host’s shouse, to slowly savour the grinding, the boiling, the pouring of at least three rounds into dainty round cups, all the while discussing in detail the latest local issues of importance, family news, any other business. A little like a Women’s Institute morning meeting, albeit with a little less gossip and plenty more coffee (and sugar, stubbornly gritting the floor of each cup).

The Kale Heywet/Medan Acts people have hijacked these ceremonies to an even greater good, however, encouraging identified HIV sufferers to play mein host – and invite in all the neighbours, including those who might have been most hostile or suspicious, evening imagining a risk of infection from simply sharing dwelling space, crockery or basic conversation.

Instead of resentment and alienation, these social occasions have apparently instead fostered greater understanding, advice-sharing and mutual support – and our experience, alongside about 20 bolshy but gracious women cetrainly felt like very emotionally healthy fellowship, even if the coffeepot did take an age to be ready and even at one point explosively overflowed. (Tch, typical women, too busy gassing to keep paying attention…)

Here rises village elder Etagehn, recalling how she recoiled upon first hearing of daughter Tigist’s diagnosis, first blaming her and "acquitting" the husband – then dragging daughter to a series of re-tests, refusing to accept the awful reality. "I said, this can’t be true – it’s just too shameful."
Perhaps the coffee ceremonies can’t be entirely credited with changing her point of view to today’s acceptance and concern. But Etagehn insists such displays of community backing – and the breaking-down of barriers and misconceptions – helped reconcile the pair, ahead of the TB and skin complications that made more practical medical help a necessity.

Now Etagehn tells the rapt gathering: "If I’d stayed so angry with my daughter, she might have been dead by now, But she’s here, a lot happier and strengthened."

Here speaks up tearful Tirunesh: "I used to be afraid to come near other people, until someone told me about these ceremonies. They really helped me get away from my fears. Sometimes I don’t even feel I’m living with the virus – I almost forget. I come as close as possible to forgetting my problems, since I came into contact with this real fellowship. The fear has gone. I feel at one with the community."

Tales are told of HIV+ victims being thrown out of doors by their own families – forced to drink water from discarded tin cans or ketchup bottles, eat only off unwanted, cracked plates. But at least here, all can sip as one, suffererers and non-sufferers, grandmothers and even a few tastebud-opening toddlers. One little boy is almost crunching his cup as he slurps down every last drop. Tigist’s son, in contrast, steadfastly slumbers in her arms throughout.

These awareness-raising coffee ceremonies – "Buna Tettu" – won Kale Heywet a "Red Ribbon" award at this year’s UN Aids conference in Toronto, one of 25 projects to be honoured from a "shortlist" of 517, only three from Africa. In the last 18 months, the scheme has reached 1,593 bedridden patients (65 per cent of whom are female), and involved 7,000 people in HIV discyssions.

Among those tucking in this morning were a few familiar faces from shortly earlier in the day, in the half-hectare fields of the Nazareth Medan Acts base. (I’m not quite sure how these women beat us down to the open-air ceremony, having actually watched us drive away in advance from the Medan HQ).

Addis Ababa and the route eastward may be known as the "high corridor" of Aids in Ethiopia (though the climate in the Muslim-dominated eastern areas seems to be too scorching and unbearable for any notable UN or US aid efforts as yet). Nazareth is especially vulnerable to depressingly high infection rates. The smooth-ish, recently-completely main road that allowed us to cover the 100km route in about 90 minutes is also regulatly covered by high levels of transit truck traffic, to and from both the capital and Arabic/Middle Eastern neighbours. Nazareth is a major magnet for both prostitutes and prospective clients – or "commercial sex work", as our guides here so consistently, if a little coyly, describe this field. The many factories in the area also draw in hordes desperate for work, while even tourists are tempted – especially by Nazareth’s hot springs.

The Medan Acts, by some self-professed "miracle", secured from the Government a patch of land and buildings on the outskirts of Nazareth, where they base not only their educative and preventative work – involving 25 local schools and 23 churches – but also provide plots of soil for HIV+ women to work, and ultimately enjoy the fruits – and veg – of their labours.

Each woman, just about robust enough to toil thanks to ARV treatment, is gifted between three and ten plant beds to till tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, onions, carrots and cabbages. Should they harvest well, the 70 women signed up so far can take home some for themselves to eat, some to bed down in their own optimistic gardens, and some to sell on – indeed, Solomon later proves a satisfied customer as the coffee gathering breaks apart.

Selmawit Benti is a former prostitute – sorry, commercial sex worker – who may look relentlessly downcast and reluctant to peer up from beneath her pink net headscarf. But she is determined to make this most of this opportunity, despite having to struggle her way from the other side of the city. Orphaned and abandoned as a child, she dropped out of school early, journeyed her from Dredor 300km away, and could only find work – and quick, easy cash – in the bars and brothels. She was diagnosed HIV+ four years ago and, as seems to be a common symptom, first needed serious treatment for incipient TB.

After spending a gruelling two years in hospital, she was advised to seek support here – and now, after three months of planting, is eagerly awaiting her first full, and imminent, harvest. In the longer-term, she aspires to become entirely self-reliant – and to see similar schemes springing up just as bountifully across the country.

"They need more support, though," the newly-wise 25-year-old cautions. "This was all set up with just 60,000 Birr [about £3,750] for the whole project, and that all went straight away. We’ve all had to pay for things as a group, like the water buckets. It’s a good project, but it could be strengthened."

Sidling our way, or at least in the crouching photographer’s direction, 25-year-old Hirut Semu sets down her hose long enough to explain how she has so far survived not just HIV, but a suicide attempt in the depths of newly-diagnosed despair. After her husband died of Aids, the penny dropped that she too might be infected – and the unwanted confirmation came as she was pregnant with a son, now four.

"I was terrified – I really wanted to kill myself," she says. Hirut downed a stomachful of Malathion, a toxic chemical used to kill rats, but concerned neighbours managed to rush her to hospital in time for her life to be saved.

Happily, if surprisingly, her unborn child survived as well, though it was three months before Hirut could be discharged from hospital. Her digestive system is still warped by the after-effects of the poison, but ARV treatment has bolstered her enough to join the women in the fields.
"I’m relieved from my worst anxieties now. When I’m working here in my garden, I forget all my old traumas and I can hope to live a better life in future."

And so to share such tragic pasts, and defiant futures, over those steaming, stimulating cups of coffee.

On the long drive hotel-wards, Solomon pessimistically ponders the the condition and contradications of Africa – "We blame the old colonialists, byet Africa has subjected itself to new, local colonialists – our own tyrants" – plus the prospects for free and/or fair trade. We also ask whether or why African couldn’t exert more power over the coffee markets, in the way the Middle Eastern states can do over their oil. For Opec, see an Ethiopian-led Copec. But for now it seems the technology is too inadequate, the corruption too corrosive, the lip-service from our developed world too pathetic, dishonest about its intentions.

Ethiopia, literally meaning "the burnt-faced peoples", was once the byword not for famine and pitiable super-poverty, but instead the greater expanse of sub-Saharan Africa, a progressive civilisation pushing beyond the Middle Ages more progressively than many of those nations now Western powerhouses. But subsequent, seemingly-endless years of conflict, destruction and neglect have come to this – according to a strangely-precise calculation from Solomon, Ethiopia has enjoyed just 105 years of peace.

Outright colonial rule of the country may have been restricted to five years of Italian control during the Secomd World War. But bloody territorial disputes, still straggling today, with the likes of Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia, have crippled Ethiopia’s chances of effectively addressing such grinding poverty.

These still-green expanses trundle by – the slipshod painted Pepsi signs; the singular "Spare Part Garage"; a bumpy cross-section of the nation’s 350,000 trucks – a few overturned in a glassy, blood-soaked mess hopelessly remote from any ambulance or hospital help; and handfuls and hundreds of the thousands and millions of "burnt-faced people" simply walking onwards, somewhere.

(cont.)

Wednesday, November 15th, 2006. 6pm, on the road back to Addis Ababa from Nazareth.

“Selam – hello – I love you!” “Selam – hello – I love you!” “Selam – hello – I love you!”
And still the kids keep coming forward, crowding around me with beaming faces and skinny arms outstretched to shake hands – several faces I recognise from handshakes just a few moments earlier, coming back for more.

“Selam”, I reply, having finally learnt and remembered just one word of Amharic, and tentatively brandish my cameraphone a couple of times in the direction of the leaping, waving, squealing swarm of children.

Marcus the photographer and I certainly caused a stir as we delved through a Nazareth village market, taking photos – and making a sudden celebrity – of 67-year-old grocery kiosk-keeper Khadija Mohammed. She patiently “sold” and resold and resold one bunch of browning bananas to a ragged yet graceful pretend customer, as Marcus snapped away beneath the booth’s low counter, having crawled awkwardly through a catflap-esque entrance at the back.

The shop can have been no bigger than the homes we saw yesterday, only this had relatively “rich” pickings spilling from the shelves: Glory biscuits, Fegegta crackers, Aladdin’s Constant mystery mixture, Scissors safety matches, more familiar yet miniaturised bags of Ariel Gold Plus washing powder, and a deep barrel of bright red lentils.

A few paces ahead of her stall, a small but severe-looking boy guarded a sack of corn, underneath a billowing brown canvas and alongside an older man who would occasionally stand and flourish a long thin stick in mock anger if the surrounding swells became too boisterous. A younger, slightly smarter man was on constant walkabout with a half-brush, half-whip in his right hand, lightly slapping the legs of any curious child who wandered too close while walking home from school – albeit never with much malice or backlift.

Their clothes may have been long-worn and spare, but they range from finely-arranged shawls and gowns to freshly-faded modern sports sweatshirts – sad to say, more often than not showing off an Arsenal badge. As here in Nazareth, 100km from the capital, so seemingly across Ethiopia – Solomon confirmed the suspicion, this is Gooner territory, save for the occasional knock-off top preferring Barca (10 Ronaldinho) or Manchester United (8 Rooney).

Such familiar fashionwear contrasts smartly with the all-pervading poverty and dated, crudely painted eyesores above eye level – here in Nazareth perhaps more so than even in Addis Ababa. Here, ramble goats, back-breakingly burdened donkeys, emaciated horses with savagery in their eyes. In Addis we had seen men randomly sprawled asleep on the kerbsides – across Nazareth, diagonal canvas strips mark out barely-there excuses for “homes”, more claustrophobic and debasing than a dog’s kennel.

Children seize amusement from riling a pet goat whose back foot is thinly tethered to a tree – swiping his horned head with a couple of quickfire volleys, only sometimes provoking enough of an effort to buck and barge in vain. (If the sight reminded me of the scene in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, and the hotel’s resentful pet goat who must inevitably escape from his ties in a fictional, factional Abyssinia-alike African nation-in-turmoil Ishmaelia, at least we were spared this goat’s eventual vengeance.)

Khadija’s small success – and may today’s attention hopefully give business a decent little boost – offers a sign of how people here can be helped to help themselves. The Nazareth Community Development Project, since its inception in June 2002, has enrolled 2,400 women into its “income-generation activities” – grassroots collective groups offering funding, business training, pooled profits and communal savings schemes for the “poorest of the poor , invariably the town’s women, engaged in such activities as embroidery, weaving, cattle-fattening, vegetable oil-mixing, sheep-rearing and engura-baking (enguar, the sour bread that is a beloved national staple, despite looking especially unappetising to us – rather resembling a Swiss roll of soggy concrete, or a furl of sloppy, paste-mired wallpaper – and tasting not a lot better. Ah, but “give us this day our daily engura”, our hosts cheerily implore – and we, equally cheerily, oblige.)

The IGA groups – split into SHGs (self-help groups) of between 15 and 20 people, and CLAs (cluster level associations) of eight to 12 SHGs – are now in the black to the tune of 487,000 Birr in savings – about £30,000. Funding for individual or group initiatives comes from members’ own contributions (20 per cent), Tearfund (ten per cent), the Kale Heywet church (ten per cent) and Dutch-based charity Dorkas Aid International.

As might be expected, especially in such a patriarchal society, many men were initially suspicious of such a women-led project, fearing – or, at least, dismissively claiming – the meetings would be little more than idle gossip shops. But as the money began trickling in – 100 Birr on a good day for mother-of-six Khadija, for example – so they started seeing a sunnier side. Now, one woman rejoiced: “My husband is the one who cleans the chairs every time we have a meeting here ahead.”

Although we discovered Khadija was HIV- - not too helpful, after all the photos, for our Aids-centred coverage; ah, how cynical – and the scheme is for the benefit of everyone and anyone, co-ordinator Mekonnen Kelsede explained how HIV+ women had much to gain – by participating, and empowering themselves, and also as other women boost their own livelihoods enough to contribute to communal care. Meanwhile, spin-off schemes involve building much-needed new homes, clothing children, improving – or, indeed, introducing – literacy and numeracy.

It could even seem a throwback to – or long-awaited implementation of – pure Communist principles. That is, had it not been for the over-indulgent sprinklings of business jargon – “capacity-building”, “targeted beneficiaries”, “economic stability”, I ask you...

All of which would no doubt be lost, for the foreseeable anyway, on the little kids now extending their palms for a different purpose, as we clamber into our van after taking our farewells.
“Money! Money!”, the understandably ask of the rich white men all of a sudden in their midst, potentially wielding power or patronage over them. But before we can even awkwardly, properly respond, our driver is spearing into second gear, Solomon shooing the last hordes away with barely a glance, and we’re literally lost in a cloud of dust.

What can you do?
But then again, what could they do? “Money!” “Money!” Well, why not...?

(cont.)

Tuesday, November 14th, 2006. 5pm, Hotel Desalegn, Addis Ababa.

Smart, pristine pink new apartment blocks are rising from the rubble in the Tele Bulgaria sub-city, a rare display of modern-day development and optimism – and pretty much misleading.

Every apartment so far stands empty– save for a tottering stepladder glimpsed through one darkened window. And getting anyone able to afford to move in might be a momentous challenge – it looks tricky enough to simply remain in one of the squalid rusty shacks that make for “accommodation” (a generous term indeed) down below, next-door and across the capital.

One of these useless blocks stands as a cruel backdrop to a jumble ofunsafe rocks, low-flying clothes-lines and patter of traipsing children andmice-sized kittens leading into the unhappy home of bed-ridden Aids patient Mikre Mesele – dank dwellings in which she may have just four more days,with the prospect of worse uncertainty ahead.

I don’t think I’ll ever quite forget the first moment of stooping, stepping in. Even by all expectations of Ethiopian poverty and squalor, this is something else. The shack is in darkness as we struggle in, barely room for Mikre’s bed upon which she can barely be seen, and even then looking moredead than even barely-alive. Another bed lies at a right angle, astonishingly sub-rented out by Mikre to raise a little desperately-needed cash – while the merest scrap of hard flooring is all that serves as a painful resting-space for daughters Betamariam Selshie, nine, and five-year-old Alemayhu.

A crackling lightbulb, dangling across the room on a rickety wire, gives a flicker of vision, as Mikre’s frail frame arches an inch or two up from herpillow, croakily sharing with us how her landlord has given her four days to leave this hovel for which she pays 80 Birr per month (about $10 – and a rip-off at a tenth of the price). He apparently wants to renovate the place– but this is surely his second attempt to evict Mikre purely for her HIV status, after only an indignant neighbours’ revolt forced him to back down shortly after Mikre’s diagnosis six months ago.

She could never afford the higher charges he is proposing – as things stand at the moment anyway, the rent leaves her with just 20 Birr per month from the grant handed over by the capital’s – and the church’s – Medan Acts programme.

Agonisingly raising her head against the old-newspapers-matted tin wall, an improbable “London-New York-Paris”-sloganned sports bag perched somehow above her, Mikre can only frown as school-uniformed Alemayhu bounds blithely inside, before just as instantly chasing a kitten back out again.

“Even before I became ill, everything was very difficult and complex,” Mikre explains. “Sometimes there were days when we had to go without any food at all. WhenI could get hold of something, we’d eat – if not, we couldn’t.”

Life was made more arduous when Aids claimed the life of her husband three years ago. Like many of the people we meet, Mikre appears to have left most of her family behind in distant countryside, migrating to Addis in search of work, in desperate expectation of a better life somehow. Twelve years after travelling 650km from Gondar, now 25-year-old Mikre can only depend on the daily calls of home carer Sisaoibeyene, one of a dwindling band of tireless, unpaid volunteers. The Medan intervention at least means fewer days of starvation, as Sisaoibeyene bakes a daily disc of loaf, while the children have also been kitted out with school uniforms and packed off to their lessons.

Mikre was married for eight years before her husband’s death – suggesting she was just 14 when they wed. He was the main bread-winner – or‘bread-owner’, as Solomon translates it, a transitory moment of mild amusement – making his plunge into bed-ridden torpor an even more crushing setback. Yet again, like many we encounter, Mikre appears incredibly philosophical and unself-centred about her plight.

“I was extremely saddened by the situation – not so much because I was afraid for myself, that I would be infected, but that the kids would go even more without – about our whole poverty and style of life, more than my husband having the virus.”

After realising she too was positive, Mikre now spends her days lying helpless, unable to stir enough even to boil a rusty kettle or cover over the cat-mess-mired plates scattered aside.

“At first when I fell ill, I was really very upset – I lost all hope, Ididn’t have the energy to go out and get something for the children to eat. But after the project started helping me, my hope renewed a bit. I just can’t lose all hope. There were times I felt so bleak – I just didn’t know what to do. But I’m not personally worried about my own situation, about myself – I just heavily regret I can’t really do something good for my children. I’m worried about their future. People in foreign lands need to really focus on our children.”

The past seems to be something to be forgotten without fuss – from the bloody repression of the 17-year Communist era, to the loss of individual loved ones – to the signing of your own HIV death warrant

Two impassive portraits hang lop-sided above Tariku Leta’s bed – the faces of the parents who died within a month of each other this summer.

But ask 15-year-old Tariku or 12-year-old brother Girma about their recent losses, and their steady-eyed replies are all about how they are coping with the present – and preparing for the future. The pair have had to grow up quickly, momentously, during the past year, now living alone together in one cabin while partitioning and hiring out their parents’ old room next-door to raise a little rent.

Girma still goes to school – though he has returned now for lunch after an unusually-inactive morning. Tariku has dropped out, and juggled such jobs as shoeshine boy, carpenter’s assistant and sheet metal worker to pay the family’s way. And while Girma still looks a baby-faced boy, Tariku has the fixed gaze and severe voice of someone many years more mature than his actual age.

“Because of trying to make ends meet, we haven’t really had time to play and enjoy things with the rest of the community kids round here,” he shrugs sombrely. “We didn’t get to enjoy childhood like we should have done, like others do.” Do they have any pleasures or distractions at all? “No, none. We’re leading a serious life of older people.”

The extended family lives 125km away, placing the burden of their parents’ care formidably onto the meagre shoulders of the two boys – and increasing the isolation as they mourned.

“When we lost our parents, we lost all hope. Our lives were completely shattered,” recalls Tariku, who takes his name from the father who died aged 47. Mother Ananetch was 35 when she died in May.

“In the past, we never really cared about anything – we never worried about where breakfast, lunch or supper came from. Now we have to cook forourselves – and earn enough money to buy food in the first place. Life has completely changed, and things are really getting more expensive,especially as we grow.

“I feel responsible for my little brother – I have to make sure he goes to school, for the sake of his future. But for now, only one of us can earn. Iwork in a metal shop but some days, like today, there’s no work for me to do – and no pay.”

A smattering of stationery sits in the corner, supplied to studious Girma by the people at Medan. Tariku has also been promised some wheat, and hopes soon to sign up to an income-generation scheme – typically, involving a $100 grant to start selling a little home produce, whether agricultural or arty-and-crafty.

He and Girma also have higher aspirations – both want one day to become doctors, a legacy of seeing their parents suffer so: “We want to be doctors because we want to participate in the kind of ordeal our parents went through. We want to make sure these things don’t happen to other people.”

Tariku quickly checks himself, loath to dwell too long on those dying days: “The past is gone. Our parents are no more with us. It’s pointless for us to think about them. We’d rather choose to concentrate on our current situation. We don’t really spend any time thinking about the past.”

Yet there are clearly some moments when bleaker memories can steal upon them unawares, often under cover of treacherous sleep. Yes, there are bad dreams – bad, because they seem good, softly-spoken Tariku allows: “Sometimes I find myself in some kind of nostalgia about our past lives, when both our parents were alive. And we get upset, reminded of the good lives we used to lead.

“That’s why we try not to think of it at all.” Men sadly forced into maturing ahead of schedule – and yet sometimes still, boys will, and must, be boys again.

Senait Dender’s home is no larger, nor any more luxurious, than a toilet cubicle – in fact, that’s what it was before a relative made the merest of alterations to allow her and baby son Yonas to move in. A sunken bed, a stiff sky-blue shawl on the wall and – well, that’s about it, a grubby baby’s bottle in the corner aside.

Before coming here eight months ago, the pair were sleeping in the streets under a flimsy blanket, having being thrown out of her uncle’s home by a mistrustful aunt and a vindictive landlord’s ultimatum: either the HIV girl goes, or the whole family.

The sight of huddled-up Senait, 22, dripping tears over Yonas in their mudbank-set settlement is sad enough – but her back-story is even bleaker: raped at 14 by the head of a household where she worked as a babysitter; forced to give up the resulting child, now nine, to a faraway aunt; infected with HIV at the age 18 by a here-today-gone-tomorrow boyfriend; then later deserted by her husband, the father of Yonas, after being laid low by HIV and opportunistic diseases such as TB.

Her husband, a soldier, initially assured Senait he was being transferred to serve in another part of the country, only for her later to discover him living elsewhere in Addis Ababa still, wanting nothing to do now with his wife and then-six-month-old child.

Yonas keeps crawling, calling for a scrap of notepaper, happily banging a stray pen against our pads, occasionally squealing, on the verge of tears and a tantrum that don’t quite come. His mother taps her fingers on his head in admonition, jabs the filthy-teated bottle into his mouth and awkwardly adjusts her rheumatism-riddled legs folded underneath her – too weak to take a walk outside, to show off her son down the scruffy-kiosked pathway.

Yet she insists she is through the worst of her sickness, having responded encouragingly to TB treatment and now a month into her course of anti-retroviral drugs: “I hope and pray that God might give me my full health back, so I can work and raise my baby myself. I have very strong hope and faith because a couple of years ago I was so ill, people were expecting me every day to die– I was virtually paralysed. If I’ve passed through those difficult days, even now I have hope of being fully healed. I’ve been ten times worse than this.”

But still, but still… “The worst days are at holiday times, like New Year or Christmas, when I see people enjoying themselves, rejoicing, visiting each other – and I find myself closeted in my room, with no one coming to visit me. Or at any time if I see or hear someone laughing or having a good time, I remember the good days I had in the past. When I could work. When I could earn my own living. When I had my dignity. Those days come back to me, and it’s very difficult. Even when people bring me food, it doesn’t taste good because of the state I’m in.”

Ah, but at least she smiled for the first time as we handed over a couple of rolls left over from (an inevitably guilty-feeling) lunch – having first checked with helpful Dr Henok whether to offer would be appropriate. (“Appropriate”? What an awkward and stupid sense of complacent Western“propriety” – hand them over, and let her and baby tuck in, for goodness’sake Aidan… He didn’t say that, of course…)

We left Yonas happily munching his surprise “treat”, and bump back to the hotel – through Confusion Square, the oh-so-aptly-nicknamed expanse of traffic chaos that makes Piccadilly Circus look like a deserted country highway; past the Medan Acts base where this morning factory worker Daniel Mekonin was a shivering bundle of nerves as he faced an HIV test, only to stride away relieved and thumbs up to us 20 minutes later, one of the lucky ones; past the “James Bond tailors” and the “Snow White laundry”, the traffic lights where a frantic wanderer raps on our windows and apparently angrily accuses me of being a Chinese billionaire exploiting his Ethiopian slaves (“Every country has its madmen”, Solomon sighs) – back to the all-the-roomier-now hotel room, to ponder, touched, on life’s shocking lottery.

Monday, November 13th, 2006. 6pm. Hotel Desalegn, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

"I have to be satisfied, just prolonging someone’s life a little..."

Hmm. Let’s start with the simpler perceptions, maybe to ease a little less awkwardly into the trickier. There’s a deckchair on the balcony, and a furry soft bed and long-drawn bath in the rest of the room. Across the street, a well-meaning European Union office flutters a flag promising “We believe in partnership”, as toy car-resembling baby-blue-and-white taxis wait languidly for any spare fares.

Further down the street from this cosy-ish, Westerner-oriented hotel, broken barricades of corrugated tin occasionally back away from garish, makeshift market stalls selling scraps of cloth, slabs of greasy red meat or the ever-essential bottles of water. Rising unsteadily above there might be a token attempt at a modern-day building boom, a half-formed monster of concrete dominated by tree-twig scaffolding and more resembling the blasted-out skeleton of a multi-storey car park.

A few jam-packed white vans veer across and alongside the occasional cab fortunate enough to find a paying customer, but the pedestrians comprise the heavier traffic, heavily bearing on shoulders a haul of fruit, a swinging timber ladder, or a a swaddle of shawls that must surely house a baby somewhere inside. Modestly paved and signposted highways suddenly swerve into rocky dirt tracks, the only coherent clues offered by shoddily-plonked French language pointers for invading foreign ambassadoires.

So, here I am in Ethiopia, that apparent by-word for starvation and suffering, pity pity and yet more pity. Caught in an uneasy clash of instincts, between wanting to project a more optimistic, forward-looking, famine-downplaying image - read all about it, the latest trade deal signed with, say, China, or France, in the parched-dry Government-led propaganda Press - and yet of necessity acknowledging the many, many human catastrophes every day, every where you look, thanks (thanks) to relentless epidemics; never-ending shortages of essential supplies, sanitation and medication; corruptly-misspent millions; and tokenistic international ignorance.

The Ethiopian embassy in London complains about the “unhelpful”, “negative images used by the media”. Solomon, one of our guides for this Tearfund-led trip, bitterly points out footage of the 1984 famine is still being passed off as present-day by some media organisations. There are the rich-ish coffee, cotton, sugar and gold to be mined here, the recent surges in cereal production, coffee exports, school access and attendance…

Ah, but then there are the doomed babies’ faces and fragile, flailing limbs - or the actually-older children yet so riddled with disease they could easily pass for newly-out-of-the-womb. These are the harder to see, to think of again afterwards - the in-and-out-and-in-again patients at the Zewditu Memorial Hospital - a former US mission facility, later confiscated by the 1974-1991 Communist government, yet now hailed by this regime as a national flagship, despite looking and feeling more like a grim, neglected old council estate - stale air and despair struggling through each cramped corridor and narrow crowded staircase. Some 600 children are regularly being treated on the mould-encrusted wards, where waste bins overflow with used needles and inter-mingling gunge.

Here, heartbreakingly, is two-year-old Mersi Kassahum, a chubby, uncomprehending face on a bizarrely barrel-chested torso yet a stick-spindly pair of drip-fed legs - HIV+ just like 23-year-old mother Nardos, both condemned to the disease by a father and husband long since fled, leaving them and a ten-strong extended family abandoned on the outskirts of the capital.

Nardos seems jarringly philosophical, even cheery as she poses patiently for necessarily-posed photos - but there also seems a tinge of denial as she insists: “I don’t want to really worry very much about HIV. What’s done is done. So I have to live with it, for myself and my daughter. This is the only outlet that could mean my child survives. It’s not important to worry about something that’s already been done. It’s not worth worrying about my husband now he’s left. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

But the unstinting aid workers out here are determined that something, much more, can be done - especially before infection, before it’s too late. Prevention of mother (or parent) to child transmission seems to be the keynote theme this year for Tearfund, especially in the run-up to World Aids Day on December 1.

One 200mg tablet of Neviraprine for the mother as she enters labour - plus a 2mg/kg dose of the same for baby up to 72 months of delivery - can apparently vastly reduce the risk of an HIV infection being passed on. Such treatments can cost less than $10 per mother - yet many still go without, in a country of between 180,000 and 200,000 HIV+ pregnancies every year and up to 80,000 babies born with the infection. Some 25,000 children died due to Aids last year, according to Ministry of Health records - but many believe thousands more are going unreported.

If a mother is HIV+, her unborn child has about a one-in-three chance of inheriting the infection - of the 35 per cent who do, 15 to 20 per cent are infected during pregnancy, up to half during delivery, and about 33 per cent through breast-feeding. The dangers linger for some months.
So much for the statistics. Mersi was here for her sixth admission to hospital. In another white cage bed, blinking and grimacing under fluorescent light, 16-month-old Amanuel is here for the first time, and has been for just a few days. Brought in for diarrhoea, tests quickly revealed a more devastating diagnosis - HIV+, like both his parents - as well as associated tooth and jaw corrosion, and ominous patches of sores across his tender skin.

Paediatrics director Dr Wondewosen Desta sighs: “Nistartine would be the right drug for his oral problems, but it’s too expensive for us - we have to use a $2 oral gel instead, and hope for the best. It’s all so frustrating, for us and for the family. My friends are giving up their jobs - it’s too much, to see 50 or 60 per cent of your child patients with HIV. Most of them have repeated admissions. I have to be satisfied, just prolonging someone’s life a little. If we treat this child properly, he may make it to school one day. But more than one-third don’t get to celebrate their first birthday if we can’t treat them.”

Sometimes the gender roles are reversed - not often, but once or twice, here or there. Engeta Muhamed, 30, watches phlegmatically over toothily-grinning son Nudana, six years old but looking more like a baby, swamped inside regulation hospital green sleeves and rolling charming, cloying eyes at the camera. Engeta says his wife left him to bring up Nudana alone - a hard task anyway for a more-often-than-not unemployed labourer whose best daily wage would be $1.50, barely adequate for food and often forcing him to go begging instead.

“He’s still coughing, he’s not feeding well,” Engeta explains. “I know he’ll probably have to stay here for a month - after that, who knows? Of course I’m worried. I’ll have to leave my boy here and go out looking for work - but I can never earn enough. Every life’s like that here - everyone has to beg.”

Nor do the staff escape, both emotionally and physically - a flimsy, sloppily-slipped-on surgical glove, offering too little protection from cuts, or a grisly and deadly splash of blood to an eye: such accidents have ultimately claimed the lives of at least five workers in this department alone in recent years.

The illustrated children’s posters on the wall look merely sad, hopeless gestures: “Clean Face Prevents Trachoma” - “Let us make child vaccination our culture.”

Hopefully, a few rather more assuring signs of hope amid all the misery might, might just emerge over the coming days...

"Sail away with me, to another world..."

"News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress - all the rest is advertising."

So, sagely, said Lord Northcliffe, and this is indeed the noblest of journalistic sentiments, a phrase that should ring in the ears, throb through the marrow and tingle through the fingers of any self-respecting journalist.

Sometimes, though, even the most high-minded will enjoy the benefit of an exaggerated expenses claim, a paid-for meal (or, better, bar tab), or the lucky dip of the freebie.

I remember well my first freebie: a box of Jane Asher cake mix, that sat at the back of my cupboard for months before I did the decent thing and handed it over to my mum.

Since then, I must confess to reading books, listening to CDs and - during one strange phase of unsolicited baskets - munching on my favourite Pink Lady apples and, er, red grapes. Oh, and the free football tickets have been muchly appreciated too, though more so for the likes of the World Cup final than an epic Coca-Cola Championship clash between Leicester and Hull.

Travel journalists, though, surely have the most easeful of occupations - I think it's safe to Judith Chalmers is a stranger to the Samaritans. Exhibit A, I offer the excellent and enviable Shandypockets pages, put together by one of those globe-gallivanting hacks we all wish we could/should have been.

In fact, we met on my one previous, dim-distant-past holiday blag, one that I am actually happy to accept as my one and only, such was the pinch-myself pleasure of the whole experience.

Of course, the obligatory plugs may chip away at what little credibility I might have had, but I tried to keep the plugs down to an appropriate minimum - yet also there where deserved. But, well, that's the game, innit...

It was a while ago now, but I was reminded to dig it out after pondering what to read next, after finally finishing "Jane Eyre" and swiftly dashing through "Monsignor Quixote" by Grahame Greene. On a similar Spanish tip (the Greene, that is, not the Currer Bell), I should really now get round to reading "Death In The Afternoon". After all...


I’ve always liked Islands In The Stream.
No, not the Ernest Hemingway novel, but the Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers duet.
Yet it was the book I tipped off the shelves in preparation for a week in the Florida Keys, the sinuous strip of more than 800 islands separating mainland US from Cuba.
This tropical ribbon running through the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico promotes itself as Paradise, but is also classic Hemingway territory, a land of adventure and daring.
Think of Harry Morgan, the Key West maverick of Hemingway’s To Have And Have Not, sacrificing his morals, his arms and finally his life to run guns, liquor and wantaway Cubans across the waters.
Or Santiago, the decrepit hero of The Old Man And The Sea, battling the raging waters in his epic – and ultimately, excruciatingly vain – efforts to land the perfect marlin.
Or grizzled old “Papa” Hemingway himself, a-huntin’ and a-fishin’ and a-boozin’ and a-brawlin’ across the Keys and his favourite Key West haunts such as Sloppy Joe’s sloppy bar.
Or, of course, a dilettante English journalist like myself, visiting to enjoy a few massages, down a few cocktails and generally soak up the sun.
The macho Hemingway would no doubt disapprove of the luxurious spa resorts springing up across the Keys, nevertheless entirely suited to the location’s sun-drenched, laidback ambience.
Fror a start, a facial would surely do little for his ruddy, hardened complexion beneath those brutish bristles.
Yet after pitching up at the palatial Hawks Cay resort, with its immaculate villas, rich buffets and live dolphin show, it would have been rude not to sample the new spa centre of which they seem so proud.
Expecting myself to immediately switch off and shut down completely, hypnotically chanting “Om”, I assumed I was doing something wrong during the first facial.
Random, petty concerns kept popping into my still-buzzing brain: how will Spurs do this season, should I buy the latest White Stripes album, if we’re evolved from monkeys then why are there still monkeys...?
But soon I was sinking, pleasantly savouring the mysterious-yet-soothing oils, the warm blasts of air brushing my skin, the taped piano trilling gently in the background.
Yes, I could certainly get used to this type of treatment.
I finally floated out of the treatment room feeling like a new woman – I mean, man. I even tried to convince myself I was making a defiant statement of macho resistance by, er, not shaving.
But resistance was inevitably futile when a little bit of pampering could feel this great – Hemingway can just go fish.
A 50-minute Swedish massage the following day was even sweeter, leaving me a blissed-out hollow of a functioning man for the remains of the day.
The people of the Keys are clearly thrilled with their flourishing spa centres.
We were treated to a tour of the recently-built facility at Cheeca, the longer-established rival to Hawks Cay and favoured retreat of both George Bushes and family.
Sadly we were not there to samples the massage facilities, but made up for it by scoffing the cuisine – menu headed by the top local delicacy, Key Lime Pie, a sweet, light cheesecake.
The Florida Keys are not merely rich in terms of the landowners and well-heeled visitors (ourselves, of course, excepted).
The area’s wildlife is a source of consistent wonder. During a powerboat tour, we spied a lone dolphin frolicking in the shallows, while flutters of exotic birds circled above busy schools of tarpon and marlin below.
For the time being, at least, the many whales, sharks, manatees and turtles to be found in the depths were keeping their heads down.
Our guide explained the importance of the mangrove islands and the sea grass sustaining so much of the surrounding wildlife.
Damaging these plants can incur hefty fines for careless sailors, rising into millions of dollars. We kept a cautious, respectful distance.
An alternative insight into the Key creatures was found at Richie Moretti’s Turtle Hospital in Marathon.
If that name conjures up images of cartoon ninja critters sporting slings, bandages and plasters to accessorise their multi-coloured bandanas (well, it did for me), then the reality is a little more harrowing.
Here, 25-stone turtles, covered in vast tumours or showing off mutilated limbs, waded painfully in their shallow basins.
Richie bought the next-door motel in 1981, when this turtle hospital building was then a lap-dancing club called Fanny’s.
He funds the hospital entirely through the motel’s $200,000-a-year proceeds – a good example of Keysian economics, you might say. Or, indeed, might not.
As a committed veggie, I was not in a position to judge the overflowing, fresh fish platters thrust our way at every restaurant, including the lively Island Tiki Bar in Marathon or the Islamorada Fish Company in, well, Islamorada.
I was assured, though, of their excellence – and the portions would challenge even the hungriest Hemingway.
Probably the best meal we enjoyed, though, for both supplies and setting, was on the charmingly-named Pretty Joe Rock Island, a tiny seabound enclave owned by the Banana Bay Resort.
This hideaway is popular with honeymooning couples, and little wonder, with its luxury en-suite bathrooms, healthily-stocked kitchen and picturesque gardens.
After a tranquil two hours, within sight of the shore yet feeling care-lessly adrift from the world, we had to be dragged away.
Key West called – the southern tip of the US but where the Keys start to come to noisier life.
If I was feeling especially, generously patriotic, I’d describe it as like Brighton, only sunnier and hotter.
This is a bustling resort that prides itself on being a trendy, liberal party town – oh, and it rivals San Francisco for campness.
Certainly the delightful old colonial homes are more densely packed than in the Upper Keys, and the strong Cuban townships dating from the cigar factories’ 19th century heyday are full of character.
Visit El Masa de Pepe for sumptuous Cuban cuisine and an enthralling exhibition, sure to leave you whistling Guantanamera for days to come.
Our accommodation, the heritage-listed, late 19th-century Cypress House hotel, was an oasis of bohemian, classy calm.
The legendary main drag, seven-mile-long Duval Street, summons any self-respecting barcrawler – and again, for research purposes, I felt compelled to do my duty.
Anyone failing to realise Sloppy Joe’s was Hemingway’s favourite hang-out either has their eyes closed to the all-surrounding merchandise – or has knocked back one too many Mojitos.
Unsurprisingly, though, Key West’s finest attraction is nature itself.
Every evening at 6.30pm – yes, every evening – the sunset is celebrated with an exuberant festival on the shore.
Musicians, jugglers, trapeze artists, wizened old men pushing cats and dogs through bizarre hoops – all come out to play and greet the setting sun as it dips graciously, captivatingly into the sea behind Sunset Island.
This patch of land was originally known as Tank Island, but as the swanky condiminiums (condiminia?) multiplied, investors understandably opted for a more romantic-sounding name.
I watched the sun go down to the soundtrack of Mustapha, an ancient Jamaican busker plucking out simple, affecting versions of What A Wonderful World and Island In The Sun on his acoustic guitar.
The next evening we took an even better look, boarding Sebago’s Sunset Cruise, a two-hour voyage of simply sitting back, sipping champagne and watching the sunset at closer quarters.
A little sore-headed after such heady sights (and a few heady drinks), another massage – this time at the Pier House Resort and Caribbean Spa – couldn’t do any harm.
Nor could a leisurely tour of Key West’s quirkier tourist attractions, including the new-ish Butterfly and Nature Conservatory.
Careful where you tread, though, when exploring a tropical greenhouse habitat home to 1,200 vivid little winged wonders.
Of course, there is also Hemingway House, complete with smug ancestors of his beloved cats – and, not much farther on, a marker of the United States’ southernmost point.
In fact, you can also spot the southernmost house, the southernmost barber’s, the southernmost grocery store, the southernmost gallery, the southernmost horse being flogged...
I also enjoyed the Key West Shipwreck Museum, not just for the hammy antics of the historically-dressed tour guides, but also for the best aerial view of Key West – for those prepared to clamber the rigging, anyway.
The Old Town Trolley Tour is also essential, even if only to get your bearings and cherry-pick where to explore further.
Just be warned, though – our banter-loving guide’s best joke was: “Sorry about the bumps ahead in the next road. Though it’s not my fault, just as it’s not your fault. It’s the asphalt.”
(I laughed.)
Our final full day was taken up by something a little different, a trip to the newly-opened Walkabout Retreats venture, back towards Marathon.
The retreat is devoted to helping guests manage stress better, with “treatments” ranging from yoga, bike rides and kayaking to thick fruit smoothies.
Perhaps equally beneficial would be a meal at the ultra-stylish Hot Tin Roof restaurant – inspired by another noted Key West resident, Tennessee Williams, who perhaps could have been happier with his lot, all things considered.
Tucking into rich food and wine while overlooking the peaceful harbour was the perfect way to see out the Key West experience – though the following day’s 45-minute flight from Key West to Miami in a low-flying mini-jet had its photo-op merits, too.
A busy week, then – and yet a ridiculously-relaxed and relaxing one, at the same time.
It was no surprise to hear almost every Key West resident explain how they had moved there for good after visiting once on holiday.
That sounded perfectly reasonable to me – if not quite personally realistic.
Alternatively, of course, there are other Hemingway-inspired adventures to try.
Bull-fighting in Spain, after Death In The Afternoon?
Braving The Snows Of Kilimanjiro?
Hmm, maybe not for me just now, thanks.
After this, they sound a little too stressful.