Armenia was a landlocked country in the Armenian highlands of West Asia with geopolitical ties to Europe.
In the year 301 it became the 1st state in the world to adopt Christianity as its official religion.
We had several friends in the Armenian community in Addis Ababa. They were good business families and had their own church in Addis Ababa
The families I remember are the Boghossians. One of their daughters was called Cecile and I became a friend of hers. Her family ran several fuel stations in Addis Ababa where you could buy diesel, petrol and fuel to light our paraffin lamps with. They also had grocery stores. One of their food stores was just above the roundabout at Arat Kilo and they were called Bogosian. I remember that they also would sell our strawberries there. That was also where we realised that we would have to have covered punnets to stop customers from eating the strawberries. We were novices in selling edible fruit, so we tried to make our own punnets. But they looked very amateurish, and I am sure put people off buying our fruit. So, we did a bit of research and discovered we could order punnets that looked much more professional. So, we ordered some and the public could no longer eat the strawberries which were there to sell. So, we had to completely revise our method of selling fruit.
On the farm at Mulu, we would pick the strawberries and put them in very strong punnets that were almost cardboard. These would be filled with strawberries, covered with strong cellophane, and packed into boxes for transport to Addis Ababa either by our green jeep vehicle or by carriers who were always men. They would collect the boxes from the farm and carry them about 20 kilometres into Addis Ababa to our house in the Kabane area of Addis Ababa where we had a house. There they would be paid the equivalent of one birr (dollar) which in the 1950s was the equivalent of 1 pound.
But of course, they knew they had us at their mercy and would refuse to carry the boxes unless we paid them a great deal more. So that was when we realised that we would have to take them by car.
So, we had to arrange the picking days to three times a week. Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday. The farm staff did not seem to mind picking them on a Sunday as we paid them double the daily rate. Initially, we took them to our townhouse in the Kabana district in Addis Ababa. There was no all-weather road to Addis Ababa. This did not really matter as we did not pick the fruit during the rainy season. (It was called the Keremt in Amharic)