Coffee lady

I thought I had blipped this yesterday, but somehow it turned out I hadn't.

More coffee related photos from Addis...and I said I wouldn't.
Anyway, I couldn't resist taking a few photos of the lovely coffee lady with her lovely coffee, at the coffee shop and restaurant at the Arada Health Centre. So important is coffee to Ethiopians, that her only job (as far as I can see) is brewing ceremonial coffee and tea, all day long. She roasts the beans over a fire, pounds them and boils them in a black clay pot. The coffee is then gently poured into dainty handle-less cups (like Chinese tea cups). I think the price of a cup of coffee was 3 birr, or about $0.17 Can.

Not to bore you, but you can also get traditional machiatos, espressos, yummy sharply flavoured ginger tea, regular tea and spriss ( a mix of tea and espresso) in the coffee shop too. Someone else makes that.

You can see the charcoal fire, roasting beans (cooling in the photo) and ceremonial grass sprinkled on the ground.

I had spent the morning observing in the outpatient clinic at the health centre. I learned a lot about how things are done there. Providers seem to be interested to learn too. I was able to tell them that it isn't felt to be necessary to clear wounds with peroxide or iodine now (or mercurochrome, mom). After OPD, I watched a radio interview being taped about a snazzy telemedicine system. In some ways it was more slick than the telemedicine systems we have in Ontario. Unfortunately, the system wasn't working because the pilot project had ended and there was no one to pay the internet bill. Sad. After that, I gave an impromptu ECG tutorial. The health officers had asked me to do that.