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Published: March 12th 2008
How's that for intimidating?
All so that a guy can get married...Back to the incredible diversity that Ethiopia has to offer, we moved on from our game drive to see some of the most unique culture. This is the sort of thing that you grow up reading in National Geographic and seeing on the Discovery Channel.
Here we saw several intersting tribes and also encountered one of those major moral dilemmas that comes with travel to these sorts of areas. While the people of the Omo valley seem to have maintained a great sense of thier traditions and culture, they majority of them have also grown up with a camera shoved in their faces. Our first visit to one of the tribes (the Hamer people) was relatively tame in terms of photo frenzy, but it was difficult to get anything out of them other than "1 photo, 1 BIR (money)". The phrase was repeated non-stop even to those who didn't carry cameras. It got a little frustrating, as it became difficult to interact with the people on a more relaxed level. We visited 3 tribes in the valley and the begging got progressively worse. We put the camera away after the first village.
One amazing experience we had was to
Hamer Woman
The large metal neck ring at the top identifies her as the husband's first wife. witness the famous Bull Jumping Ceremony of the Hamer tribe. For a fee of 150 BIR ($15) each we were allowed to watch the ceremony and take unilmited photos without hassle. The ceremony is intented as a right of passage for a young man who is to be married. He, while nude, is required to leap across the backs of several bulls to prove his worth. The more bulls the more worthy he is. The pre-curser to this is a ritualistic beating of the female relatives of the man. They demand that the elder men beat them repeatedly with sticks to show that they believe the man is worthy. The women really stole the show here as they danced around taunting the men, laughing and smiling as they were subjected to repeated lashings. The brutality of this may seem shocking to anyone reading this, but that is part of their culture and this ceremony was by no means held for the sake of tourism. This is truely the way they live.
On another note, one example of tourism gone horribly wrong is the Mursi people (you may know them as the ones with large plates inserted into the women's
lips). They have gotten into such a frenzy for photos (understandably so, as they have really been exploited for so many years) that we do not visit them as part of our trip. Trucks have been stoned and people have been injured in the chaos associated with photo riots.
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