A recent letter fails to explain why Béa has been travelling so much.
But there's a hint.
At last: "I have furniture in my rooms!"
It arrived in Nairobi weeks after Béatrice did. If you have to camp, you sometimes might as well be outdoors as in. So she was.
This is her latest selection of pictures.
 She found the old fellow, who is blind, at the end of January on Chad's border with Sudan, a region two and a half days' drive from the Chadian capital Ndjamena and full of scattered groups of refugees.
One of Africa's several "forgotten wars" has been taking place for the past year on the other side of the frontier, where Khartoum's military and allied local Arab militias are fighting rebels and bombing people.
The embattled area, where a small UN humanitarian team has just arrived (AFP), is called Darfur and has long been the "wild west" of the biggest country in Africa.
Béa had a word for the nurses and doctors of Medécins sans Frontières (MSF in English): "E-POU-STOU-FLANTS" ("A-ma-zing").
Those people, she says, are working miracles with very little among refugees who have absolutely nothing.
The Comoro Islands are right over the far side of Kenya, out in the Indian Ocean, where my Factory friend found they looked lovely from the air but had little of much interest to show on the ground.
Apart from the dubious privilege of holding a world record for the number of successful or foiled coup bids in a little more than a quarter-century of independence -- it was another round of "unrest" that led her there -- Béa found only the capital Moroni worthy of note.
Here's the mosque by the sea.
Women wouldn't normally dream of setting foot in the shady main square whence Béa took that picture, but she was allowed to, being foreign.
A little tidbit. The Comoros apparently have the distinction of being one of the few Muslim nations where women are allowed to own property. The men don't have houses.
Instead, they have to choose which of their wives they plan to spend the night with.
 As for the last picture, my friend says it was taken close to home, where now she sets foot from time to time.
The way she tells it, you'd think this was her back garden.
I liked the date stamp.
There are worse ways to spend Christmas Eve.
6:49:07 PM link 
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