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Axum, Ethiopia, where the Ark of the Covenant is said to be guarded.

13 months of sunshine. This is the lure that the government of Ethiopia uses to attract tourists. As most of the marketing, it is only a half-true, but do not bet which half is the truth, because you would lose. Their year has 13 months, but in the summer it’s difficult to see the sun. Ethiopia is a strange country; where nothing is what it seems, and everything is different from what is expected. Perhaps that’s the reason it is so special.

For them we are in the millennium year. Their calendar is not only 7 days but also 7 years behind, and that is not the only difference. Their Julian calendar system distribute the year throughout 12 months of 30 days each, plus an additional 5 days month that turn the leap year in six. That was the calendar used in Egypt, which gave rise to ours. The name of the months are different from the ones we know now, their end of the year is September 11th, and other nonsense although, if we are objective here, their calendar is much simpler than ours. Ours is a result of arguments between Roman Emperors to see who had more days in their month: Julius or Augustus. Their daily clock is also so simple that is overwhelming. They start counting 12 hours since the sun comes out until it goes away, when they start counting again (for example, six in the morning would be one for them). 12 hours of sun, 12 hours of darkness. Their proximity to the Equator allows them to maintain it like that throughout the year.

When it’s summer time in Europe they suffer the rain season, and they have storms almost every day. In that season the whole country is so abundant in vegetation that it looks more like the Scottish highlands than the dessert that we expected, there’s the reason why it’s called the Greenland. Their ground is so porous that even if it rains cats and dogs, if it doesn’t rain in 3 days, the crop fails. That’s the way it was before and that is the way it’s going to be, in spite of their big lakes and their African monsoons. The worst situation happened 25 years ago when millions of people died. While this was happening, the president of the country was spending a 20% of the annual budget preparing the International Communist Party Conference. If that was not enough, he didn’t allow for the international help to get to the most affected areas in retaliation for being the refuge of a rebel group. More than 3 million people never got assistance and two thirds of them died. It is ‘funny’ how those same leaders where the ones that some years before, when they overthrew the former king, showed him a video of people starving combined with images of the king drinking champagne and feeding the lions of his own zoo. Tell me what you brag about and I will tell you what you lack.

To bé continued …

Ethiopia photo gallery