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.