Behind the scenes

Another one for the "you-never-know" file:

I was sitting in the main office waiting for the Head of the Center to finish his phone call. He was speaking in Amharic, so there was little for me to eavesdrop on, and instead I spent the time glancing around the room. Behind his desk is a massive bookshelf filled with thick, 2-ring binders. Many of them were annual files on the courses taught here, some financial reports, but a few of them were titled "Consultants". This is a long-term project, so some of those binders indicated a year, such as "2006-2008", but one of them in particular caught my eye as the title down its spine simply read, Concultants. There was no year specified, so I hope that's not an indication that they are referring to those here at present! Maybe there is an underground group of concultants that I don't know about who are influenced by lunar powers, holding secret meetings around a cauldron of steaming kai wat and chanting in ancient Coptic robes. But I had to shake the idea out of my head and tell myself it must be a simple spelling mistake, and that what the Head of the Center was saying on the phone in a tongue utterly incomprehensible to me did not have to do with little dolls, pins and needles.