The Hamer's of the South

When I got to Abra Minch I contacted Elie, the Israeli/American I had met in Addis. He seemed very sweet, though not the sort of guy I would usually opt to travel with, only because he was young and American, but at this late stage in the game I didn’t have much choice.

I hadn’t met any other tourists heading to the South of Ethiopia, I hadn’t actually met any tourists in over 2 weeks except for the Dutch women in Lalibela who were not heading south and weren’t particularly interested in another travel companion. I sure as hell was not prepared to get lost in the wilderness with tribes I know nothing about, as a white woman alone, especially considering that I was still recuperating from spending weeks beating away men in the North. After my recent temper tantrums and threats to go home early, the warning signs were clear that I was about to lose my battle with patience. Mine was a fuse that was getting shorter and I could tell because my lower lip was now prone to occasional trembling: always the first sign that my composure is wavering and the frustrated ‘ugly cry’ is brimming.

Elie had given me a short window of time with which to meet him at a market place in Dimeka. He had already found his guide and that guide was taking him to spend a couple of nights with a Hamer tribe, an opportunity I was not going to miss. I hopped on yet another long bus ride, and this time I sat next to a girl who kept calling me Kim. She was a very affectionate girl, she kept holding my hand and stroking me and at one stage she even fell asleep on my lap. I am not at all naturally affectionate, and I spent the whole bus trip awkwardly not knowing where to put my hands while this girl lay slumped across my body.

At the end of the ride she asked me for money.

“What for?” I asked.

“For friendship” she replied.

“At home I have friends who work for free, I don’t need to buy friends” I said. I thought I was being funny but she just stared at me blankly. What I wanted to tell her was that she should have been paying me rent money for my lap.

I wish that I had the words to adequately describe the sight that greeted me at the Dimeka markets. Stepping off that bus I felt a wave of sensory stimulation wash over me. It was so overwhelming that all I could absorb was a sea of earthy browns and bright reds, a general human chatter resonating like a single music chord over a steady drum beat and a smell of something distinctly warm and raw, a comforting smell at first, because it is so innately human, later I was able to identify it as a mix of dirt, human body odour and meat – both dead and alive.

I wasn’t allowed much time to take it all in. Elie grabbed me and my bag within seconds of getting off the bus and he told me that there was less than five minutes to catch the next bus out. We had to get to Turmy, the closest town to the Hamer tribe hosting us for the next few nights.

I did a quick lap of the markets. This wasn’t a show for tourists; there were no other tourists there. It was their weekly meeting place, and place of trade. There were a lot of clay pots, beaded jewellery, bags of tobacco and dried meat spread out on animal skins or the bare dusty ground. People packed themselves under the slither of shade offered beneath the only tree in the market place, and they stared at me, of course, but they didn’t seem bothered by my presence. It was me who looked like I was going to faint. I was that character in a film who sees the real Santa Claus and his reindeer or flies into Jurassic Park and collapses at the mere sight.

In hindsight I was pretty lucky to have that feeling all over again. It was the same way my body had involuntarily reacted in Opuwo in Namibia when I first came across the Himba’s. It’s a nervous, giddy, uncontrollable energy that comes from thinking you’ve discovered something that nobody else ever has… a treasure map, a fairy in the garden, a tribe of people hidden deep in Southern Ethiopia’s mountains. Of course, I am not the first foreigner to have travelled there or seen these people, many travellers, writers and film makers have stood where I stood, but nobody I know has been there yet, and I also knew that I would probably never be back there in my whole life ever again, which is what made it such an exciting place and such an exciting moment in my life.

My favourite thing was a whole heap of men wearing AK-47’s slung over their shoulders. At first I was horrified, but I quickly realised that they were all carved from wood! There were loads of these men, in their beaded skirts, and beaded head pieces, often holding each others hands, proudly wearing their fake, wooden rifles across their back.

Elie, myself and Elie’s guide Gino boarded the beat-up bus. Inside it was a whole other sight worth describing. It was red; red cushions and red material decorated the walls and the roof of the bus and red feather boas were strewn across the dashboard.

As I got on and wedged myself on the edge of the front seat I looked around me. Every person on there was half naked, wearing cow-skin hides and beaded headpieces. This one woman was sitting across from me, her long dreads matted in clay, her bare breasts bouncing beside her hips, between her breasts sat elaborate loops of metal and beads and she just sat there open mouthed and staring at me, I think she was in shock. I was thinking it was just like a comic piece, this woman and I could not have looked more different and yet we shared the same facial expression, just staring back at each other in disbelief.

A man reached over and held his fist out in front of my face. In his hand was a small vile of dark brown powder. I knew that it was ground tobacco, and I assumed it would make me sick, but I also didn’t think I could say no.

I took a pinch and snorted it and straight away my eyes watered and it burned my nose and the back of my throat, like I had expected that it would. It took a few seconds to run down the back of my throat and then I started gagging. Wow it was strong stuff. It took about half an hour for my stomach to settle, for my nose to stop running and for the head spin to subside… I think it was just tobacco? He kept offering me more and I no longer cared how rude I came across saying no, that stuff was gross!

I smiled to myself. Even as my throat burned and my stomach churned from the tobacco. I was on a red-feathered bus with a rowdy group of Hamer people heading off to stay in one of their villages, and for the next few days at least I had some English speaking company and a little bit of protection, in a guy I could pretend was my boyfriend.