The Miji Orphanage

When Elie and I got back to Turmy after two full days with the Hamer people I was dying for a shower and a beer and he was dying to eat a whole chicken.

Art the American Mormon joined us and so did Gino our guide, one of his friends, Didli whose village we stayed in and his sister-in-law. It didn’t take long for Didli and the sister in law to get drunk, but when they did they excused themselves and left. We couldn’t converse with them, but it was fun having them their, giggling to themselves and staring at us with curiosity.

I grew to like Art, though he remained creepy. He was worldly and intelligent, but I couldn’t figure out why on earth he was there. He said that he was writing a Hamer-English translation book, but had been there for a year and had never spent a single night in a Hamer village, and when I invited him to join me on my trip to see the Mursi tribe he said that he would love to but wouldn’t know how to get back without me. I suggested he catch a mini-bus like everyone else and he was horrified at the thought of it. It was then that I found out that he had been hiring private cars to chauffeur him between Addis and Turmy. He was nearly sevently, had a pacemaker and an internal defibrillator, so I guess that was a bit of a hindrance, but then why live in this tiny little village in the South of Ethiopia in the first place? I advised him to stop sleeping with 19-year-old local girls, in case his defibrillator started going off and ran out of batteries.

He did say one thing that really ran true for me, though I hadn’t put it into words, he said:

“I always feel white here but I never see black”

I totally agreed.

Elie was sweet but very young. He outed me to the Gino and his friend and when I blew up about it he said; “I didn’t know homophobia existed!... though I used to hate gay people”. He also said at one point that he doesn’t like Muslims.

It made me miss Chris, back in Namibia, probably the best travel buddy I had ever found.

I decided that night that I was determined to take a bus the next day to Jinka. In Jinka I would try to find the orphanage for the babies who were left to be fed to the hyena’s. From Jinka I would find someone to take me to see the Mursi tribe. Although I knew that they were one of the most famous tribes in the world, all I knew was that they had big stretched lips and ears with massive disks in them, and that the comparatively tiny stretched ears I had probably came directly from their culture.

I was tipsy and tired and said my goodbyes to go to bed.

I was just crawling into bed when Gino came knocking on my door. He had just seen the man who runs the orphanage in Jinka pull into the hotel and go into the room directly beside mine. I could not believe the odds! It was too coincidental to be true.

But sure enough Gino was not lying to me, and he had already invited the man to come and have a drink with us.

The man’s name is Lalo. He had founded the orphanage with an American guy, he too now lives and studies in the US. Originally he is Hamer.

He told us the story of when he was twelve years old and he watched his sister get drowned in the river by one of the elder women in his tribe. This was the second sister he had lost in the same way. From that moment on, at the age of 12, he decided that he wanted to put a stop to this practice. He explained that there are three reasons why babies and young children are considered miji (meaning cursed). The first is if they are born out of wedlock. The second is if their top teeth come through before their bottom teeth and the third is if a child falls and breaks one of their teeth before the age of 5. He said that these babies were killed to prevent the whole village from being cursed.

Lalo had made it his job to try to talk to the villagers and try to convince them that these babies are not a curse but a blessing.

There are now seven saved children in his orphanage, but it is impossible to know how many babies are killed in this way.

He said his plan is to send the children back to their village to live. I told him that I didn’t understand why he would want them to go back and live with a family who actively wanted them dead. He said that if he could show the family that these children were not cursed than perhaps those tribes would stop the practice of infanticide.

He told a story about a young couple who had fled from their village through the night into town to find him and give him their baby before it was killed by their parents. They were not married, but they were in love and had conceived a child. They had not fed the baby when they fled again back to their village. He spent the night with a hungry screaming baby, trying to find it some milk in a small village that was still asleep. The baby was a young child now, and Lalo was ready to send that child home again.

I told him that I wanted to visit the orphanage in Jinka, and he said that I could. But he also said that each visitor had to pay the equivalent of US$25 a month for a year. I wanted to go to the orphanage, and if I had seen that it was working I would have probably given money to support it anyway, but I was sceptical. I wanted to see the orphanage first before I signed up to anything, but he seemed to want the business deal the other way around. I got the details of the orphanage, arranged to meet his brother there the next day and went to bed tired, drunk and a little dis-heartened by the whole Ethiopian money thing.

The Jumping of The Bulls Continued

After all the beatings were over it was time for the jumping of the bull.

Slowly people drifted out of the clearing and got back on the same road. The bulls were supposedly waiting in another clearing not so far away.

On the road back we asked Gino to explain what was happening.

Apparently the Jumping of the Bulls is a boy’s initiation into manhood. A herd of bulls are brought together and held in place, lined up side-by-side, by the other men of the village. To prove that he is a man he must run up and jump on the back of the line of bulls, run across their backs and make it to the other side without falling off. If he makes it, he is a man. If not, he is shamed.

“So where does the beating of the women fit into all of this?” I asked.

Gino explained that by the women taking the beatings from men they are showing that they love this man whose initiation day it is, whether it is their son, their brother or their cousin. The more beatings they endure for him, the more they love him.

We got to the second clearing and took our seats to watch the spectacle. A man offered me his little wooden stool. This stool is usually for men to sit on only, women were to sit on the ground and not a stool. I had the face paint already, usually reserved for men only, so the stool kind of finished off that initiation.

The women continued to jump around, blowing their bull-horns and shaking the bells strapped to their legs. As about 25 bulls were herded in I was disappointed, not even a dozen were actually bulls, the rest were cows. But even so, they looked fierce, and fair enough too considering the beatings that they were copping. The cows had patterned scars decorating their bodies, and decorative pieces cut out of their ears, I could not shake the thought that these people were cruel to brand animals like this, to inflict pain on them for their own decorative purposes. But then again, I suppose if the women are willing to take beatings and wear scars for their men, then it isn’t a far cry for them to think the cows can also take beatings and wear scars for them too. The women had moved on from tormenting the men with their horns and instead began tormenting the cows. They were trying to riel them up, and were doing a good job of it. They blew the horns in their ears and pushed them and teased them, preparing them for the show.

At one stage ten or so men formed a tight little circle to have their ‘coming of age ceremony’. I wasn’t allowed to watch this one it was strictly men’s business. But all reports from Elie suggest that I didn’t miss out on anything. They do something symbolic with sticks, and that was about all I understood. It wasn’t nearly as dramatic as getting whipped or jumping over a bulls back, so my interest was quickly lost.

The animal cruelty magnified when it was time to try to get the cows in one straight line, I watched in horror as the men pulled them by their horns, their tails and their mouths, hooking their hands around their teeth even, yanking them in place and holding them down. The cows bellowed in agony and mooed in protest and for that it was beaten more, several times I had to cover my eyes with my hands, it was unbearable to watch.

The original plan was apparently to get 8 bulls in line, but the men had such difficulty getting them in place that they decided 4 was enough.

The man of honour stood at the edge of the circle, wearing absolutely nothing. I watched as he psyched himself up, I could almost see the pressure weighing down on his shoulders. ‘It’s only 4 cows’ I thought to myself, but I knew that it wasn’t the animals he was afraid of; I could imagine the shame brought to him if he didn’t jump those cows. I could picture him watching all of those women nursing their fresh wounds, reminding him that it was all for nothing.

The naked man of honour took his run up and jumped effortlessly onto the back of the first cow. He teetered on the edge, balancing on one foot for a second before he ran across the rest of the cows, arms outstretched for balance, wobbling only slightly before landing back on solid ground at the end of it.

He jumped back up and did it again, four times in total, each time he was successful. At another point he stood and paused, full frontal nudity, arms outstretched, the sun behind him, and I thought it was a breath-taking image.

He made it look so easy, I can only assume that it wasn’t, and that there was at least some level of skill involved. However, if I had a choice between leap-frogging cows and getting beaten until blood was trickling down my legs like the women did, I’d choose the cows.

Although the bull jump was not so spectacular, the whole day had been. It was surreal, so surreal it felt normal, and I am aware that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But as we packed up to go I wondered if some things are so hard for the mind to process that it just shuts down a bit and normalises everything.

We all got back onto the long winding road through nothing. A handsome and shirtless young Hamer man took my hand and we walked in silence side-by-side, hand-in-hand the whole way home. Elie had found an AK-47 and was wearing it across is chest. Hundreds of people littered the road, walking in the same direction. It was another stunning moment, watching the bright coloured beads and dull coloured animal skins around me. Listening to the jingling bells on a hundred women’s legs and listening to twenty-five tired cows mooing as the sun was setting on all of us. 

The Jumping of the Bulls

The next day we walked along that same empty road heading back in the direction of Turmy. From kilometres away we could hear the celebrations drifting over on the breeze. At first the sounds just flirted with our instincts, horns hooting mostly, but frequently enough to feel a sense of fervour. As we got closer the sounds teased us even more, we began to make out the rattle of bells jingling and people cheering. There was an unmistakable energy in the air and it was seductive and enchanting.

When we stepped through the clearing we found ourselves standing just meters away from hundreds of brown sweaty bodies. It was mostly the jingling of the bells that echoed around us, they were strapped to the legs of fifty or so women all jumping up and down on the spot in front of us. A few of the women were blowing the horns that cut through the continuous jingle of bells.

The women were wearing cow-skin skirts laced with coloured beads, their red-clay dreads were hopping up and down on top of their heads. They wore cotton shirts lifted above their stomachs and tucked under their breasts exposing their backs that were already proudly displaying the raised welts and bleeding wounds from the lashes they had been copping from the men and their sticks.

The men sat on the slope in front of them, perched on little wooden stools. They too were dressed for the occasion, coloured beads on their heads and in their ears and draped around their necks and waists. They all wore brightly coloured skirts tucked up well above the top of their thighs. As ‘traditional’ as they looked they all had western boxer shorts slipping out underneath, except for one old man, who didn’t seem bothered at all that his most precious assets were baking in the sun.

One or two at a time the women would jump up to one of the men. She would stand in front of him jumping on the spot, thrusting her pelvis toward him, back and forth, blowing her horn, and it seemed to me that her sole intention was to annoy him; annoy him enough to get him up off his little stool and drag him to the centre of the clearing.

In his hand the man held a long, thin, flexible stick.

The woman would stand less than a meter in front of him, still jumping up and down, her little bells jingling, and staring him in the eyes, daring him to hit her.

And sure enough he would.

He would raise his arm high and swing it down hard. Every muscle in his tightly toned and fat-less body would tense. The whip would crack through the air, wrap around the woman and snap across her back. The woman would not even flinch. Not a single woman that I saw that day flinched when she was struck.

When the stick broke the man would toss it away and go back to his seat. The grass was covered in broken sticks. The woman would stop bouncing, her bells would stop jingling and she would join her friends who stood behind her celebrating by jumping up and down and blowing their horns.

The blood trickled down some women’s backs. Some of the gashes were pussing and oozing a yellow fluid. And yet not one of them looked to be in the slightest bit of pain.

And the strangest thing was that the women kept presenting themselves for more. Even when they were hit so much that their backs were white and red they still went back for more. New lashes on fresh wounds, and still none of them winced with pain.

‘How barbaric!’ I thought as I sat in both awe and repulsion.

It was so barbaric and repulsive that I wanted a turn.

Gino got me up and led me to the centre. The only problem was finding a man who would hit me. The men all cheered and laughed but none of them were willing to hit a Western woman.

“She cannot handle it!” They explained to Gino. ‘Our women are strong here, but white women are not. It will kill her.” They kept telling Gino.

I insisted that I wanted to be hit.

Finally they found a boy who would do it. He was probably only 14 or 15, but not one of the men was prepared to strike me.

The women continued to bounce somewhere behind me, their bells filling my ears and my head. I kept my t-shirt on, not because I was cheating out of the pain, but simply because I was shy. And I didn’t jump on the spot either. I just stood their, face clenched tightly, waiting to feel the blow.

The boy stood in front of me, he looked more scared than I was, but he dutifully raised the stick and landed it down across my arm.

I barely felt a thing.

“Come on!” I yelled out. “Hit me properly!” and I gestured for him to strike me again.

He raised the same stick up (it hadn’t broken the first time so was still in good shape). And again he hit me and again I felt nothing.

“Hit me again!” I yelled and this time I was so determined for him to do it right that I stared him down and kept a straight face, I wasn’t showing any fear this time, I was showing him a challenge.

He raised his arm, and held the stick high, and then he brought it down.

I felt a sharp sting across the top of my back. It sent a shock through my body and my legs buckled slightly.

He definitely got me that time.

I laughed but I am pretty sure that my eyes welled up with tears. All around me the people laughed and I resumed my spot on the hill beside Elie, I decided just once was enough. Some of the men shook my hand and gave me high-fives one old man even hugged me.

The women resumed their spot in centre stage and one at a time they stood and accepted the beatings from the men.

The sting along my back did not subside, I relished the burning sensation and when I lifted my shirt to show Elie I felt a sense of pride when he described a purple line that spread from my left arm all the way along to my right shoulder blade.

The boy who hit me approached me with some coloured mud and with the tips of his fingers he gently painted lines around my face.

Only men had painted faces but I guess they made an exception for me. Another man painted Elie’s face, his lines were far more detailed than mine, but it was a man’s honour after all. Men got the warrior face paint, and women got the scars.

…To be continued…

Didli and Delabaino

When we got to Delabaino we were greeted by Didli. It is hard to guess his age, even he didn’t know, but if I had to I’d say he was about thirty. Then again if I was told that he was fourty I would believe it. Didli was tall and lanky, he was wearing black and red bands around his forehead and neck that were made of plastic beads. His teeth were brown and his eyes dull which made me wonder how nutritious his diet was, however he did seem to move and speak with energy. What was most striking about him were the hundreds of little scars, about 1cm long, in neat rows and columns across his entire chest and stomach. We had brought a lunch of chicken and rice with us, which Didli eagerly devoured while I took the sight of the village in.

It was a small village and I wondered if it was just for one extended family. There were only a collection of five huts, and about a dozen cows and a dozen goats. The huts were similar to the ones I slept in in the Himba village, they were made of thin tree branches, had a stone floor and were as basic as a hut could get.

After lunch Didli took us to the village farm where perched on a little hill was a tree-branch roof leaning on crooked branch poles. Beneath the shelter sat three women whose role it was to keep watch over the side of the hill where maize and sorghum crops grew. All day, everyday they had to sit and watch the crops, protecting them from scavenging monkey and crows.

The women greeted us as and instantly offered some of their coffee. A large calabash was resting over a stone fireplace that nestled glinting coals and held the weak coffee offered to us in coconut shells. The Hamer people could not afford to buy coffee beans so the coffee they made was from the shell of the coffee bean which is why it was so mild tasting, and also why each sip had flaky bits of shell that I clung to my lips and tongue.

The women marvelled at my tattoos and piercings and even the hundreds of little bites all over my body. Then we just sat and watched to women braid each others hair. First they rubbed out some of the dry clay from the braids. Then she would slap gooey, smelly animal fat on each braid and throw dried red clay powder on top and rubbed it all into the braids. The whole process took about an hour per woman, and they told me they did this twice a week.

Thick solid silver rings were clamped around all of the women’s neck and I asked them about it.

Apparently these heavy rings are soldered around a woman’s neck when she gets married, where they will stay for the rest of her life. Two of the women were first wives so they had the privilege of wearing two of these massive rings, if they were second or third wives they would only get one ring.

I also asked them about their scars.

Didli got his chest scars as a sort of trophy for killing a man from a rival tribe.

The women’s patterned scars that ran down their arms and bellies were for decoration.

The massive welts across their back however were not so neatly placed. These scars they collected in a Jumping of the Bulls ceremony where the men of the village would lash them with sticks. The more lashes you bore the man in your family the more you proved you cared for him.

Two of the women were heavily pregnant. They both looked in their early twenties, but one was pregnant with her second child and the other her third.

I got very bored sitting there. Funny, that a sight at first so amazing had quickly become normalised for me. Didli had gone and left us there with the women, both Elie and Gino were asleep, and the novelty of watching the women clay each other’s hair soon wore off. So I got up and took myself for a walk.

I walked along the dry river thinking that it was a smart way not to get lost… only somehow I still managed to get lost. I had followed the river for about a half hour when I realised that walking in such heat, with no water, no food and no one knowing where I was a bit of a silly move. So I turned around to head back. At some stage the river must have forked off in to two and somehow I missed it. At one stage I was lost in my thoughts when I took a step and the earth beneath me twitched. I had nearly stood on a snake. A green snake that was easily two meters long. It’s head was buried in a hole and I leapt a meter or so in front of me when I realised what it was. My heart was racing, thank God it was busy with something in that hole , I ran off with my heart pounding.

After a couple of hours I started to get seriously worried. This river was taking me nowhere, and my head was feeling light and dizzy. What stupid Australian doesn’t know to take water with them when wandering off alone? It was getting late and I weighed up my choices: sit in the shade to prevent extra water loss and wait to be found, or follow the river all the way back and see where I got lost.

As I sat there trying to figure out the smart thing to do I felt someone creep up behind me. It was Didli, with Gino not far behind him. Didli was angry. He yelled at me and gesticulated wildly. I didn’t need to speak the language to know what he was saying. Gino was a little calmer “never walk off alone” was all he translated for me. Didly had followed my tracks to find me, he had even found the spot that I had peed and gauged how dehydrated I was… I thought that was pretty cool. Though seeing as I had peed in dirt and the colour would not have been noticeable I wondered if he had smelled it, or even tasted it to know… I wanted to ask but didn’t.

That night back in the village life was still slow. It would take a long time for me to adjust to a life of that much sitting. The very first journal entry I had made on the way to Africa I had said that I imagined life in Africa to move slowly, and that thought had lured me here. I thought that it sounded peaceful and almost romantic. But in the village in Ghana and this village in Ethiopia, it did not feel so romantic, in fact I found it painful.

I watched two little boys, maybe 5 years old, milk the goats and cows. Both boys wore a cow bell around their neck. It was in case they wandered off so that they could be found easier. I wondered if Didli wanted to put a cow bell around my neck after today’s little adventure. They handed the cow’s milk to the adults and the goats milk to the kids. When I was offered some of the milk straight from the cow I thought the first sip was not so bad. It was still warm, and the cow was still standing in front of me when I had that first sip, and by the third sip I was ready to gag.

For dinner the women mixed up sorghum and spinach and heated it over a fire. It was edible but had the texture of beach sand. It had no salt or spices and therefore no flavour at all. This is the same meal they all eat every single night. For breakfast they told us they have the weak black coffee and some cows milk and that is it all day. It is only for celebrations such as weddings and bull ceremonies that anyone has meat, and there is no guarantee how often that is.

After dinner Elie, Gino and I lay on a cows skin and looked up at the starry night. Apart from some faint singing drifting in from a nearby village and the cows stamping their feet there was no noise. I wondered what it would be like to live here and those early romantic images of Africa drifted in and felt real. Maybe I could get used to this pace? I wondered. I wouldn’t have to wear clothes, I wouldn’t have to worry about money, and every clear night I would be able lay down and look up at the stars. The best thing about this village, I thought, was that it had no alcohol. It felt safe.

When it was time to sleep we were led into the largest of the round stick huts. There was a fireplace with a faint glow filling the room up with smoke. Cow skins were spread out on the stone floor and also hung down from the roof. Gino, Elie, two of the women and two of the children slept together side by side inside the hut. Before I had gone inside I noticed the men and the boys crawling up together on a matt outside. Apparently men and women here never sleep together. It was an uncomfortable sleep. The smoke was suffocating, the ground was hard and in the middle of the night I woke up shivering from the cold.

A Mormon, a Jew an Atheist and Tribesman.

The night we spent in Turmy I had a couple of beers with a 67 year old Mormon from Utah, who, for last year, has made the Turmy Hotel his home. He was there on a self-appointed task: to write an English translation of the Hamer language. He seemed to know a lot abut the Hamer people.

Firstly he told me how their beliefs sounded very similar to Christianity.  They believed in one masculine God as well as a holy spirit of sorts. They also cleansed a baby in water shortly after birth. They believed in an afterlife for people who were good and a sort of repentance when people were bad.

My Mormon friend took this to mean that all people innately believed the same thing, and thus it was proof that Christianity was true. I asked him if Christian missionaries could have influenced their beliefs and he replied that according to the Hamer people these have been their beliefs ‘forever’.

I argued that for a tribe that does not record anything, ‘forever’ could be a few generations.

We never resolved that discussion but he moved on to tell me some more interesting information on the people I was about to be sleeping with.

The most interesting, and perhaps shocking thing he told me was that when a girl reaches puberty she is encouraged to have sex with some, or all, of the village men in the hope that she will fall pregnant and thus her fertility will be proven. A girl who cannot fall pregnant is not worth much in marriage.

The problem with this (among many other problems I am sure) is that the baby who is born from this is a bastard child and thus unwanted. When the baby is born it is taken away from the village, its mouth is filled with sand and it is left for the Hyena’s.

I was horrified. He told me there was a man in Jinka, another town a few hours away, where an Ethiopian-American has set up an orphanage to try to rescue these babies. I decided then that I would find this man and this orphanage before I left Ethiopia.

Mr Utah was not only a source of information but he was quite funny. And despite the fact that he was sleazy, and also a bit odd, we got along quite well.

He described his “two wonderful days” having sex with a 19 year old local girl (he was nearly 70!). I just wish he had spared me some of the more graphic details!

He also told me that if I do get to participate in a Jumping of the Bulls ceremony, where the women don’t wear tops, then he’d come to see me with my top off.

Later on Elie told me how much his sleazy comments bothered and offended him. They didn’t affect me at all, after the four months I had spent in Africa my tolerance to such comments was pretty high.

The next morning I woke up covered in bites. And I mean covered!

I counted over 75 on my left arm alone but they ran all over my back and stomach and both legs. I was writhing in itchy pain. I had slept coated in mosquito repellent and used a mozzie net, so I didn’t know how it had gotten that bad. Then again, I couldn’t be sure they were mosquitos anyway. And they were too big to be flea bites. I really don’t know what had bitten me but I wanted to claw all of my skin off.

At breakfast we met Budello, a little boy with no family. He just spent his days wandering between the two hotels in the town, taking food from whoever will feed him and sleeping wherever someone will offer him some floor and a blanket. Turmy is a small, quiet town so I assumed he was well known to the locals.

Turmy consists of two roads littered with little tin-shed shops selling material sewn by locals, cigarettes and juice poppers. The only restaurants were in the two hotels and even the street food was pretty scarce. Surrounding the town was bare rolling hills. When I stood at the cross road, the highest point in town, I stared out to the horizon, searching for a sign of life. I knew that these enigmatic tribes lived somewhere out there. I was picturing them weaving their material and sorting their beads, and also stuffing the mouths of babies with sand. But no matter how hard I strained to see something the horizon stayed barren and lifeless.

After breakfast Gino, Elie and I headed off into that bare landscape. We walked for over 10km in sweltering, dry heat toward a village named Delabaino.

On the way we passed three people: A girl bawling hysterically, being escorted by two men. It was a surreal sight, on a long stretch of empty road, to see three Hamer people, in their animal hides and beads, that seemed to appear from no-where. I wasn’t sure whether or not to worry; they didn’t look like they were hurting her, but she seemed to be in pain, choking on her own sobs and wails.

Gino stopped to talk to one of the men. The story Gino translated to us was that the man was engaged to be married to the girl’s sister who died very recently. As a result, the girl’s parents gave her to him to marry instead. Now the girl was hysterical, she believed that her sister’s spirit was angry with her. She picked up a handful of sand and dumped it on her own head.

“See!” The man told Gino.

“This is proof that an angry spirit now lives inside her body”.

On the walk I was describing the Himba people in Namibia. I was telling Elie how similar the Hamer and the Himbas looked. They both used a mix of animal fat and clay to dread their hair, which also meant they smelled the same. The body adornments were also strikingly similar, only the Himba’s did not use any of the small plastic colourful beads we can find in cheap Chinese shops, but the animal hides and the thick neck pieces were all the same.

Gino jumped in and said that the Himba people originated from the Hamer people. The Himba’s migrated from Ethiopia to Namibia. It seemed a long way to migrate without leaving pockets of similar tribes along the way, but they were so similar that I believed him.

I found the Hamer people a lot friendlier than the Himba. When you pass a Hamer person they smile, wave at you and usually come up to shake your hand. Whereas a Himba person would only approach you for money, and if you said no they would yell angrily in your face. Then again, Namibia saw apartheid and genocide that Ethiopia never saw, in which case, if I were a Himba person and the German’s had massacred my ancestors I’d be pretty cranky too.

On the walk two women escorted us for a kilometre or so. They were chatting away to me and giggling. Gino told me that they were laughing because I was carrying a heavy bag and both Elie and Gino were carrying nothing. The women and I agreed that women all over the world work harder than men.

When the women left us an old man took their place. He walked with us the rest of the way and even joined us under a tree for a water break. He was wearing a soccer jersey and a loincloth. The whole time he had one testicle hanging out the bottom of his cloth.

For 10km I looked around confused: ‘where did these people come from and where were they going?’ I wondered. They really seemed to appear out of nowhere and vanish in much the same way. We didn’t pass any huts or villages or signs of permanent life. And yet they all wandered around as if there were roads and street signs and a map could tell us exactly where we were.