Bulawayo Morning Mirror Edition 1161 - 17/9/2026

Passengers arriving at Addis Ababa please verify the new Ethiopian Heath requirements before you fly.
The form to be completed online before flying, apparently only applies to the following countries -Nigeria, South Sudan, Rwanda, Kenya, Zambia, Central African Republic,Tanzania,Angola, Congo - Brazzaville, Burundi and D.R.C.
However every person who stepped into the airport was forced to provide proof of this 'Health Visa'.

An agitated fellow was waving a large QR Code and making all disembarking passengers very unhappy, even those in transit.
We did try and complete the supposed form online, but it would not accept the country of Zimbabwe, at any rate.
Site: https://e-thtp.ephi.gov.et/thtp/

THE DREADED EL NINO

There has been a lot of chit-chat about El Nino this year, Zimbabweans talk in hushed voices about this phenomena because El Nino could mean life or death in this part of the world and in many others.
El Nino means the 'the boy.' and the specific boy in question is Jesus Christ. It's a name bestowed by Peruvian anchovy fishermen on a weather pattern they had noticed happening around Christmas time for hundreds of years.
But that story always bugged George Adamson, a professor studying climate and culture at King's College London. 'Why do they call it the Christ Child when it can be so devastating ' he wondered. Turns out, the thing we call El Nino today - the three-to-seven-year cycle of Pacific Ocean heating that can trigger floods and droughts in far-flung corners of the globe - is not what those fishermen in northern Peru had in mind.

The aforesaid Peruvian fishermen had no idea they were the part of a much bigger picture - quietly living in an area where ocean and desert collide. Annually the Humboldt Current brings cool water up the South American coast from the south. Thanks to the water temperature, the air is dry. The rain, which is seldom seen the desert ,is large, but every year, for a little bit, right around Christmas, that changes. The current shifts direction, bringing warmer water, rain and different fish that can't normally live off the cool Peruvian coast. 'That's what they called El Nino.'

Today, there's possibly a Super El Nino intensifying in the Pacific, sending hotter-than-average water east from the tropics to crash into the South American coast. That warm water raises coastal sea levels and heats the air - far more than the annual El Nino does - layering another blanket on an atmosphere already warmer than it was four decades ago. While it's expected to peak between October and December, this El Nino is already reshaping hurricane season.

Scientists began putting two and two together about this climatic occurrence in1925, when ornithologist Robert Murphy published a book called Bird Islands of Peru. His work was connected to the hunt for guano, thick layers of bird poop that happen to make a great fertiliser and, also, a gunpowder ingredient. Murphy's research took him up and down the Peruvian coast, documenting colonies of seabirds and their excrement. But the year he went on that journey coincided with a series of natural disasters.

"The floods and storms and people and seabirds are dying' Adamson reported. That was how the name El Nino, which had first appeared in print in the early 1890s, expanded in meaning. It wasn't just the annual Christmas change of pace. Instead, Murphy connected El Nino to both that phenomenon and this other, scarier, one, which happened more rarely.

Murphy's book captured the interest of American and European climatologists, many of whom then went to Peru to learn more.
Ultimately it brought a lot more scientists and a lot more data to bring all the parts together.

What single phenomenon connected three things that once seemed to have nothing to do with one another: a hazy star cluster over the Andes called the Seven Sisters, a failed monsoon in India, and warm water off the coast of Peru

For generations, they were separate clues, divided by continents and oceans. But now we know they were signs of the same climate pattern.
Many thousands of years, countless scientific minds and instruments, at work for centuries, and in a nutshell - the formation simply called El Nino.