Festival of Thousand Stars Arba Minichi Music and Dance and Music Festival

The hottest rendezvous in December
Southern Ethiopia is the cradle of mankind. It is the home of 55
distinct and diverse peoples who travel annually to Arba Minch, the
centre of the Rift valley, to meet, celebrate and perform their
traditional music and dance at the Festival of a Thousand Stars.

The festival of diversity
Last year over 500 performers journeyed from desert, lake lands and
mountaintops to bring their music and dance to a joyous 15,000 crowd.

This is a great opportunity to experience the cultures of this land
gathered together and to visit a rarely seen and breathtakingly
beautiful part of the world. A destination well beyond the tried,
tired and over-visited tourist trail.

Expect to see up to 1000 performing stars under the clear sunny Arba
Minch skies, all with wildly different and colourful traditional
costumes and customs. They sing and dance to celebrate life and death,
birth and marriage, their precious animals and the richness of the
land that they love, as they have done for millennia.

A fair trade charity
Global Music Exchange has worked with the Baka people in South East
Cameroon for the last 15 years. They recorded the Baka's music and
have used royalties from CD sales to fund projects chosen by the Baka
themselves. After seeing the success of this work, the Christensen
Fund invited GME to record an album and help the Department of Culture
of the Southern region of Ethiopia to stage the 2005 Arba Minch
Festival of Music and Dance. It was a huge success.
"... more than four times as good as I could imagine!" Ato Darut,
Governor of Gamo Gofa zone.

Evocative live recordings
Festival of a Thousand Stars has now been released. The album is the
soundscape from three incredible days of performance, the best of the
2005 Festival. Its infectious, spiritual and hypnotic sound will make
you feel you have travelled to some of the deepest parts of Ethiopia.
Royalties from sales will create wealth in the communities of these
diverse groups and will help ensure the survival of their traditions.
It brings the performers financial rewards but more importantly the
knowledge that their traditions are valued and respected by their
Ethiopian neighbours and the wider world.

The "raison d'être"
Global Music Exchange believes that if traditional musicians get fair
returns then they become primary producers, rather than consumers at
the bottom of the pile reliant on handouts.
The extremely rich biological and cultural diversity of Southern
Ethiopia is under real threat. With increasing pressure to conform to
the outside world there is a real danger that traditions will be lost.
The Festival of a Thousand Stars keeps these cultures vibrant and very
much alive. For further information please contact Chelima Fade on
07940 266 773 or email her at .If you want
tour operator to facilitate your tour to Arbaminchi and Omo valley
tribes,contact or visit your web-
site:ethioirenaissancetour.com