Hijinks on the playground

Kids having fun with one of their cousins, in Toronto.

Below is a list of interesting words or phrases I saw in Ethiopia. Wish I had kept track of more of them. I don't mean to make fun of Ethiopian spelling.
Here are my ideas for why spelling of English words is so variable and sometimes bizarre in Ethiopia:
- Ethiopia was never colonized, and at various times the English, French and Italians exerted influence on the country. All of those Europeans may have different but similar ways of spelling a word that means the same thing.
- Ethiopians pronounce every letter. They aren't comfortable with silent letters. (As they shouldn't be: silent letters don't make any sense.)
- it's quite possible to be a success in Ethiopia with minimal knowledge of English.
- we don't share the same alphabet. Written Amharic has hundreds of characters, and there are dozens of other languages besides Amharic.
- many words may be spelled phonetically according to how they are pronounced by Ethiopians.
- I think it may be perfectly acceptable in Amharic to have more than one spelling for a word.

Barely bread (barley)
Rediet spatial salad
Macaroni with meet
Foul with two breads (fool or foowl is a refried bean dish)
Hum and cheese sandwich
Fish and cheaps
Our "gusts" can go ... ("guests")
Humbugger
Gato cake
Weeding dress
Donate (doughnut)
Minuets of the department.
Cosmotics. (cosmetics)
Telltale (tagliatelle)
Chicken served with Penny
French firce and catch-up
Kid goat in the oven. (no spelling mistake there, just an interesting menu item)