Human geography Most (84%) of the people in Ethiopia live in rural areas and make their living from farming. Lots of these people grow coffee which originally came from Ethiopia. I like a cappuccino myself so I set out to visit a coffee farmer and grab a cup. What I saw really surprised me. I know how much coffee people drink and I've seen coffee shops on every street corner in the UK, so I thought these farmers would be rolling in it. Instead they are struggling to survive because the price of coffee is so low, and they are sometimes forced to sell it for less than it costs to grow. Having paid £1.85 for a cup at the airport I found this incredible. Apparently most of the money goes to the middlemen who buy the coffee and the big companies who roast it and put it in jars. All seems a bit unfair to me, so I vowed to buy fair trade coffee in future. This means that the money actually gets to the farmers who grow the coffee. It's supposed to rain in Ethiopia almost continuously between July and September, and then again a bit in February and March. But in the last few years these rains have often failed leading to drought. This means that farmers can't get their crops to grow and it may lead to famine. Famine has happened many times in Ethiopia, and thousands of people have died, but you can't blame the weather for everything. A richer country would have a back up plan when droughts happened but Ethiopia is too poor for this. It's poverty is due to unfair trade rules, huge debts and the costs of fighting wars. Amharic is the official language in Ethiopia but I just couldn't get the hang of it. It was made more confusing by the fact that over 100 other languages are spoken. Most people are Christians and belong to the Orthodox church. This means they celebrate Christmas on 7th January. They also have 13 months in each year and a calendar that is 8 years behind ours in the UK.