Wednesday 21st October 2009

Today we had to do some interviews in the morning, but we wanted to do these as soon as possible as we knew we had a lot to get through today.

We went to an organisation called EYES (Ethiopian Youth Educational Support), where I met Birhan Woldu. She was two years old in the 1984 famine and had her life saved by an Irish aid worker who gave her an injection. She is now Director for EYES. She now has a degree in nursing and a diploma agriculture, a very inspirational person.

We interviewed her for the film and as her interview was so good we are going to make another film for the website which is just her story. After the interview I went back to her house to get some footage with her father, whilst I was there he organised us to have a traditional coffee ceremony.

I thought I had arrived in heaven, those that know me well, know my love for coffee. A coffee ceremony is basically a social gathering, I suppose it's where the traditional “Coffee Morning” comes from.

Friends and family come together, sit around a table and have a good gossip whilst drinking three rounds of coffee. That is one ceremony, you'd usually do three ceremony's in a day.

In the house on the floor is a small pot with burning charcoal, on top of this in a small fry pan the raw coffee bean is roasted at a hight heat, (I'm sounding like a cookery programme here). I realised I've never seen a raw coffee bean.

This produces quite a lot of smoke (This is all indoors) and smells beautiful. When roasted the coffee is put in a pestle and ground down with long mortar.

When that is fine, the coffee is put into a jug and is topped up with water, that is then placed on the charcoal pot to boil.

Ethiopians like their coffee, but they like it with lots of sugar. It's fair to say how much coffee would you like with your sugar sometimes. Sugar is put into the bottom of the cup and the coffee poured into the demi-tasse cups.

As part of the ceremony we also had a huge plate of popcorn. I was reluctant to leave this house. . . .

I was so interested in the ceremony that I filmed most of it as I thought it would made a nice website film.

This was the last thing that we had to film, so I knew whilst going back to the hotel that the hard work started here.... Over the next two days we need to produce...2 x TV Films, 2 x Website films, 1 x radio package and be available to do live inserts. Should be an interesting 48 hours.