Meantime in Kenya
Meantime back home in Laikipia, the drought that has been going on for nearly a year has finally broken – somewhat. Up until the middle of October it had still hardly rained at all - just a few scattered showers. The humanitarian crisis and extreme livestock death rates have been in the international news quite a bit, lately. Back in Laikipia, we started to notice that wildlife, too, were dying. Many animals were rib-skinny, with new carcasses showing up daily. Usually in a drought like this, big animals like buffalo and eland are some of the hardest hit. Our friend Heather Larkin found this skinny eland along the (dry) Ewaso Nyiro River.

Ethiopia Trip Conclusion
Sorry, dear readers, we’ve been a bit remiss in keeping up the blog lately. Getting back on track now. We left you in the middle of Ethiopia, which was a bit unfair, we admit. So to conclude our trip… After two fascinating days in the area around Yabello, we stopped for one more meeting (with a group called SOS Sahel that is doing some great participatory mapping work) and headed out. Our hosts at CARE had suggested that we go back to Addis via a different route. Our drive took us west of Yabello and into the land of the Konso agro-pastoralist people.

Ethiopia Day 7
Sorry we have not posted in some time; we have been on vacation and haven’t been online much! Getting back to our Ethiopia trip – we are nearly finished relating the important parts of the trip. Day 7 saw us out the door of the Yabello Motel by 7:30. Back to the kindergarten restaurant for some breakfast ful, before we met Aliyu from CARE. We then headed out to look at some of the sites where Aliyu and CARE have been working. As in Awash, the Borana community in the Yabello area are maintaining large fenced kalos – areas that are not grazed during the wet season and are kept as a dry season reserve for lactating cows, calves, and weak animals

Ethiopia Day 6: August 31st
Instead of patronizing the motel restaurant again, Tegegn suggested that we go into Yabello town for breakfast. We soon found ourselves at a restaurant that looked a lot like a kindergarten: we sat on miniature multi-colored plastic stools eating off miniature plastic tables in an outdoor area surrounded by colorful murals. Here, we discovered “ful” (a sort of bean stew served for breakfast) and “special ful” – ful served with a bit of fried egg and spiced cheese, along with a big fluffy roll. Full of ful, we headed to the CARE Borana office up the road. We spent most of the rest of the morning talking to Aliyu, a rangeland expert who

Ethiopia Day 5: August 30th
Tegegn picked us up at 6:30 and we were on our way for a long day on the road. Our destination was Yabello, in the south of the country – a good 600 plus kilometers from Awash. In the early morning light, we crossed back through the lava-crater landscape, climbing out of the hot lowlands and back up to the highlands towards Addis Ababa. Well before Addis, though, we turned south and back into the Rift Valley, passing a series of lakes on either side of the road. The landscape was heavily agricultural, with green fields of tef, beans, and maize. From the lake region we climbed up into the highlands again. Here, instead of flat fields of tef, we found a rugged terrain with many fr