In near silence, a dozen women volunteers moved around a table, filling hundreds of cups with sweet tea in this day centre for old people in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The elderly people were barely visible in an unlit room, where they sat playing cards, sifting stones from lentils, or just waited, almost motionless, for their daily meal to be served. There were men wearing the same uniforms they’d worn decades before, as soldiers under Haile Selassies’s regime; old priests in their robes; a former tailor in his patched-up suit… The centre seemed to me to be a living relic to Ethiopia’s recent past.
