We've left Ethiopia. We're returning home after a week that was brutally exhausting both physically and mentally.
First, there's a civil war in northern Ethiopia. While it's true that in the center/south life goes on and things function somewhat, the feeling of insecurity is present throughout the country, and the only real chance you have to return home safely is to trust your route to guides who know when, where, and how to go. The area where we source our coffee is called Oromia and it's a region controlled by rebels who want independence. Here you can only talk about security in extremely relative terms. The rules we're used to and consider normal don't exist.
Secondly, there's extreme poverty in Ethiopia. All the images you have in mind of malnourished children from Somalia are a harsh reality here that's hard to put into words. We traveled about 1500 km of off-road in a land cruiser for a week, as they can't be called roads. Ethiopia has asphalt on only 30% of its roads, and the rest is permanent gravel and is full of people, whether you're passing through villages or forests.
Thirdly, in Ethiopia we quickly realised we couldn't eat or drink water during the day because we wouldn't have anywhere to go to the bathroom. Not only are there no toilets, but you can't even go "in the woods" because the moment you get out of the car, you're instantly surrounded by at least 10 children begging or wanting to touch you. And if you're even less lucky, you end up in a commotion like we did when an accident happened in front of our car: a motorcycle with 4 women ended up in a ditch and one of them was left lying in front of our car. Dozens of people appeared instantly, surrounded the car, started arguing and shouting. Nobody helped the woman on the ground, instead many started banging on our car and demanding money, becoming increasingly aggressive until some kind of local police appeared to pick up the injured woman and calm things down a bit. The chaos is so widespread that you literally don't know if you'll arrive alive where you're headed. Any road is a real danger for accidents, whether from animals, children, truck drivers, or motorcyclists carrying animals, coffins, furniture, or 5 other people. On the road connecting Ethiopia to Kenya, the only better-paved one, there are at least 2 accidents per hour.
It's not necessarily better in the capital Addis either, because here you have to stay in hotels, otherwise no one guarantees anything. Just from our experiences, we can say that one person in our group had their phone stolen from their pocket, and two others who went "sightseeing" were attacked and ended up at the police station, where they learned there's a very high risk of kidnappings in the city.
BUT. If you get past all this, if you ignore everything mentioned until now, if you have patience, Ethiopia also has some of the most beautiful people on Earth. Not just physically, but also in interactions, the people we talked to and worked with delight you with sincerity, grace, and naturalness. Coffee grows primarily wild in forests, and the harvest from the lots we tasted is very, very good. Unfortunately, most of these lots end up in China/Asia. China is, in fact, the biggest threat here, because they're doing modern colonisation through an evident policy of mass marriages with locals and thus owning EVERYTHING in Ethiopia.
They have a different calendar, they're now in 2016. Otherwise, Ethiopians are not only extremely religious, but they also have a very large mix of religions. Orthodox (Coptic) and Protestants are the most numerous, but there are also Muslims, and conflicts occur frequently, especially since they are uneducated, poor, hungry, indoctrinated, and used by the various warring factions.
