After three weeks in the UK in June/July it looks like we will get another break in September. Such is the low level of forward planning here that we have only found out in the last few days that everybody travels to be with their family over the holidays (literally “holy days” here) of Ethiopian New Year and Meskel. Actually if we had done some more determined probing about the college year, we might have found out sooner. When we showed our planned schedule at the start of the course, nobody raised any objections, but then we didn’t specifically ask about the holy days. As we were told during in-country training: if you don’t ask Ethiopians for information they tend not to offer it! Ethiopia uses the Julian calendar consisting of twelve months each with thirty days and a thirteenth month of five days, or six days in a leap year. Not only do the months have different names from the ones we are used to (in our Gregorian Calendar) but the year starts on what is, in our calendar, the 11^th September (this is why none of the Ethiopians who worked in the World Trade Centre in New York were killed, as they were all on holiday). In Ethiopia it is the year 1998. New Year is the 1^st Meskerem (11^th September) and is followed by Meskel on 17^th Meskerem (27^th September). So, after planning our usual HDP sessions we have found that most people will actually not be here for a period of three weeks. Given that it can take more than two days for people to travel to their home town it’s not surprising they don’t come back to Awassa between the two holidays. After some creative re-scheduling of our sessions, so we can still finish at the end of October, we now look like having three weeks at college with absolutely nothing to do.

The one good thing about this is the possibility we can do a trek in Bale Mountains National Park. The park is approx 80km to the East of Awassa and covers a large area of high altitude (over 3500m) plateaux. We had hoped to go there in November, before moving to Gondar, but September is a better month to go and we now have time on our hands!