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.