GREEN is the land in Wendo Genet. Millions of shades of green all overlapping each other in forests and foliage of every possible shape and size that stud the rolling hills. Forests on fire, their smoke mixes with the morning mist and rises with the lush humidity and temperature. The heat, the forest fires, the refugee monkeys are bringing out the worst in the women who are waiting lined up in an orderly queue. No gossip today. The only question was, WHERE IS THE WATER MAN? Recycled green and plastic drums are waiting for the padlocked pipe to be opened. Patience wearing thinner than the clothes on the backs of the women who wait.

YELLOW is the color of the recycled plastic drums near Dekhamare and the bright, bright sunshine that is busy beating down on shade-less, shrouded women, also waiting for their water. It is a meeting point where the tanker will offload the weekly ration and it's late. Probably, the driver, high on CHat as usual, lost all track of time. But for the waiting women every second in the sun is carefully scored as a century. The women are squinting from the sun, their teeth bared in grim anticipation of what the dust of an approaching air-conditioned car will leave them. They are also grimacing at the new disaster specialist (donated to Dekhamare by Denmark), driving by in the air-conditioned car. It looks to him like the women are smiling a friendly hello. He waves at them as his driver speeds away.

RED is the Sea said Ahmed Ali, sighing before his usual evening bath. So far away from his home in Dupti and the loyal Awash River he grew up next to, he figures that an empty bottle of coke should do the trick. He fills the Coke bottle from the muddy waterhole, careful not to stir up the silt as he draws it. The Gods must be crazy! Why on earth can't he have a hump like his camels, he thinks, before seeking forgiveness instantly from the Lord he is about to pray to. He pours the water from the bottle of Coke into his cupped hand and slides it up and down his body. His folded fingers forming his palm into a tiny spout, the tiny trickle poured slowly out, drop by drop, from his hand to his body for the "bath" taken standing up. He makes sure his entire body is wet and cleaned with the hand that holds the water-- first left, then right, the body sectioned off and washed with exactly one coke bottle of water. Needless to say, in the searing heat, no towel needed and Ali proceeds to pray.

WHITE snow piled up outside his window, Alex dreams of heat and turns up the radiator as he heads for a hot shower. He turns it on and leaves it running as he leaves to turn on the kettle for tea. Later he opens the freezer to make up an ice pack required for his raging knee, injured after his sauna and steam bath in a swimming accident at his the new gym he joined because of its Olympic-sized swimming pool. Alex holds the icepack firmly on the inflamed muscle and watches the angels swimming around in his newly acquired wall-to-wall aquarium. His mother calls and asks about the accident, telling him to drink eight glasses of water a day.

BLUE skies over Bahr Dar where day begins with Belaynesh reaching down to the river to bring up the big, big Tassa. Eight large Tassas fills the clay insrra and she raises the rope over her head and round her shoulders to hoist the Nile water on her back. Crocodiles watch her from a distance, but she doesn't care. This river is hers not theirs, and though the officials have come round her house and told her Tiss Abbay is hydroelectricity not a tourist attraction, she doesn't really care either way. Abbay will be hers because she is the one who has to carry it home and drink it and use it. Who are these crocodiles to scare her and the officials to tell her she'll lose it if she doesn't use it? Ereg wediya! Belaynesh looks back and sees water, water everywhere…she'll have to come back and get some more…