Naked Ethiopian and Argyle socks

I slept - boy did I sleep, I slept for 11 hours.  With the help of some drugs, but that's a very good thing.  Turning off one's brain when manic is a good thing. Thanks for modern drugs.

I feel truly privileged to be able to access medication.  Whenever I am manic I am reminded of an incident that occurred when I was working in northern Ethiopia.  I was walking around the town of Makele with some colleagues.  It was a war zone then but nothing was happening really in terms of fighting at that time.   We came across a woman walking in the middle of the road who was attracting a lot of attention.  She was naked except for her Argyle socks.  Makele in Tigray isn;t the kind of place where you see bare breasted African women.  That part of Ethiopia has a tradition of orthodox Christianity going back longer than many European countries.  She had heavy blue metallic eyeshadow on. She was young, I guessed no more than 20 years old.

Women in that part of Ethiopia didn't wear that kind of makeup then.  I remember wondering where she obtained metallic blue eyeshadow.  Strange what goes through your mind at the oddest of times.   She was shouting out something in Tigrayan, a language that I only know two phrases in.  She kept kissing the road while local people were laughing at her - she yelled at them..  Then a lorry load of soldiers came out of nowhere and she ran after them - they laughed at her too.  After they drove away she started to follow us.  I wanted to give her my jacket and help cover her up,  but my two companions insisted that we do what the locals did and just ignore her.  To this day I remember her and wonder how she'd be if she had access to the same medical facilities as I do. I feel bad that I did nothing to help her.   I wondered where she got her Argyle socks from too.

Legacy of wars make people crazy, so many wars in our planet's history. There are a lot of crazy people in the world maybe that's where it all stems from.