One day at little AHOPE, B is talking with the office staff about Happiness and The Belly and how after three months in Addis, her stomach is comparable to the two little boys. The office people laugh, and Abebe teaches us the word for fat in Amharic: wolfrum. Its a word we come to know very well.

Since B is leaving, we host a thank you lunch at the house for the people in the office. Genet spends most of the morning cooking shiro and a couple of other stews, and we all end up eating like pigs. Then, we have a coffee ceremony and we all sit in the sunshine, drinking the thick black coffee.

In the afternoon, we go to big AHOPE, where we watch M and B teach their conversational English class. They are teaching above and below. The kids sit on tables, or lie on the floor, and B spends most of the class lying on the floor with them, to demonstrate being below the table. At the end of class, I am talking to two of the boys when one of them grabs my cafeteria lady arm flab and says, wolfrum. The kid behind him, ever the peacemaker, says No, strong. Sorry, peacemaker. Its wolfrum.

For dinner, the adoptive father comes over with his daughter. They have obviously bonded and the father is ready to get home. He is waiting for approval from the US Embassy in Kenya, where their papers have been sent, but because of Easter, the office has been closed. It is the first time he has eaten Ethiopian food in Addis, and he watches in wonder as his little girl puts it away. Unsurprisingly, we all chow down as well, shoving shiro in our mouths in our best attempt to achieve the wolfrum Ethiopian baby boy belly.