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.