They say my great-great grandfather was an innkeeper and made a lot of money serving travellers on the road to the city.

There are several fables that talk about the wisdom of innkeepers in the past who knew about everything because they heard news from and talked to different people that visited their inns.

I had a wonderful experience of staying at a different inn and being pampered by a female innkeeper and waitresses each time I travelled to Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia, from ‘Shambu’, a small town some five hundred kilometres from the city, where I had taught for an academic year before I got transferred to Addis Ababa.