On to Turmi

Trip Start Feb 20, 2007

Trip End Jun 2007

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Flag of Ethiopia Turmi, Ethiopia
Saturday, March 3, 2007

Our drive to Turmi was broken with a stop in Key Afer, where a local market was being held. Over half the people (Tsemai and Bana tribes) present were traditionally clothed, and it was wonderful to see them in a more natural environment than a tourist visit to a village. The Bana people were particularly beautifully decorated, with men often wearing white body paint, with striped legs and a sort of rectangular grid on the torso, and some with wonderful designs on their cheeks. Like all Ethiopians, they stood tall, proud, with slender, regal features, high cheekbones and beautiful noses. They shaved all their hair, apart from a circle at the back of the head, which was covered in red clay in some, a sign that they had killed a man or fierce animal in the last year. The women were usually topless, wearing skirts which were short at the front and long at the back, made from goatskin decorated with shells (from Lake Turkana) and beads. Their loose braids of hair was cut in a sort of fringe, and coloured red with a mixture of ochre and butter

Hamer girl

. They often wore a hollowed out half pumpkin (or some fruit like it) shell on their heads as a sort of hat, which then doubled up as a bowl for drinking from. I happily browsed the market for about an hour, chatting with the people in broken mixtures of Amharic and English, with the usual crowd of children clutching at me.

After lunch we drove for four hours to Turmi, through arid, yellow land, passing through the land of the Bana and Hamer people. It was truly surreal looking at the tribal people we passed, I felt as if I was looking at the pages of a National Geographic, except here the people were real and waved with smiles when we passed. Turmi is a small, one street town, and is one of two commercial centers (Dimeka being the other) for the Hamer tribe. Kevin and I walked before the sun set, carrying boys who were fetching water on our shoulders. We went to the local water pump, about 500m out of town, and waited as the boys queued to fill their ten litre plastic containers. We enjoyed this moment, watching the locals laugh and joke in the soft evening light, happy that their day of work was nearly over. We carried the water back for the boys, remarking that carrying twenty kilograms of water was hard enough work for fully grown men, let alone skinny little boys of eight or nine. On our way back to the hotel a handsome, proud, traditionally dressed Hamer man who I can only describe as looking like a warrier befriended me. He spoke almost no Amharic (and no English at all), but seemed to have taken a shining to me. He kept repeating something to me in Hamer, which I didn't understand until a boy beside us told me he was saying "You are my good friend". Absolutely surreal.

After the sun went down I met with Oliver, a Galway man who is married to a local Hamer girl with whom he has a beautiful daughter, Gabrielle

Hamer girl 2

. He is the Ethiopian director of an Irish NGO, whose name or work I won't get into here. He kindly invited me to join him in eating his dinner with his wife and her sister (who owns the hotel we're staying in). Dinner was roasted goat, spiced and mixed with onions and chilies. I was somewhat apprehensive of eating goat, but actually quite liked it - it tastes rather like mutton, if a little tougher. It was good to eat meat too, it is Lent here (as I suppose it is back home, too), and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church's followers (who make up most of the non-Muslim religious in this country) strictly fast in this period, and completely abstain from eating meat.

The next day we visited a Hamer village, which was a fairly pleasant experience in comparison with some of the previous ones we've gone to. This was partly because we walked for about a mile off the main road to one that is not often frequented by tourists, who prefer to stop by the main road, walk into the village stare and snap a while, and then leave. We were invited into a small circular wood and mud hut with a low ceiling above which the children sleep at night below a conical thatched roof. A local watery coffee made from leaves (and not beans) was prepared for us over a smoky fire and was drank from the hollowed out half pumpkin shells described before. Most impressive here was the complete absence of inorganic materials, everything was made from wood, animal skins and other natural materials. The only thing I saw that looked out of place was a tin can that once contained rice. A beautiful, decorated woman of about 20 was sucking a baby in the corner, and two teenage girls with uncovered small breasts were also there with us. We sat there for about an hour, enjoying this domestic scene, and chatting with the Hamer's with the aid of our guide, Wagu, who acted as a translator.

The Hamer are particularly proud of their culture, and are in far less danger of having it eroded by touristic influences, Oliver later told me

Hamer Hut

. One local tradition which is shocking is that it is believed that if a child's first teeth push up from the lower gum and not the upper then that is a curse, and the child is abandoned and left to die at the foot of a local mountain. When a man wishes to be freed from his father's influence he must undergo a ritual bull-jumping ceremony, whereby he has to run, jumping from back to back of row of about twenty bulls, done completely naked. Once successfully completed he engages is an orgy of violence, whipping the backs of women suitors, scarring them for life. We went to see such a ceremony the next day in the Dimeka market, but left after a while, all of us strongly feeling that it was being put on for the benefit of tourists. When we left there were more faranjis than Hamers present, but we later learned that it was in fact a genuine ceremony. I didn't regret the decision we made, however, one has to follow one's heart when traveling, more often than not a bad or unpleasant situation can be avoided if something "feels wrong", and the odd thing one misses out on is far outweighed by the bad situations one evades. Also, on reflection, I don't think I would have particularly enjoyed the whipping part of the ritual.

The market in Dimeka, was, however, the real deal, and thoroughly enjoyable. Once again more were traditionally dressed than not, and there was a sense occasion about the whole thing that led me to believe that people dressed up especially for the day

Hamer Man

. It seemed to be more of a social event than a day for making money, men and women chatted in the shade of trees, selling bananas, tobacco, cloth for the men's skirts, ochre and butter for the women's hair, and necklaces and bracelets for tourists (I imagine that any decorations needed for themselves are made in the villages for the villagers, and not bought at market). The people were friendly and smiled when spoken to in Amharic, and I managed to have a few simple conversations with them. The experience of chatting and sharing a smile, a joke and a laugh with people who look so different from me and who are culturally from another world is one I will always treasure.

We spent three days in total in Turmi, our activities being what I described above. In the afternoon I generally lazed about drinking tea or coffee, reading, and writing my journal, broken with a few evening walks. One day I decided to give chat, the most popular local narcotic a try. Ethiopia is the world's biggest chat producer, being its biggest export after coffee, I believe, a sort of green, leafy plant whose effects are not condemned in Muslim countries, and so is eagerly chewed by Arabs denied of other stimulants all over the Middle East. One picks about ten or fifteen leaves, pops them in the mouth, chews for a while so that it becomes a juicy ball, and then leaves this in the side of the mouth, occasionally turning it, sucking it until no juices are left. It has a slightly sour taste which becomes quite unpleasant after a while. The whole process is then repeated several times, and it is not until an hour or two later that the effects are felt. I didn't really enjoy the effects, it makes one feel energized, talkative, twitchy, uncomfortable and a little paranoid. I only had enough to get a feeling for what it did to you, apparently you need to chew it for days to feel the full effects

Hamer Village

. No regrets though, it was certainly interesting to see what all the fuss was about, it seems to be the national pastime of Ethiopia's men, everywhere they sit in shaded groups munching on the stuff.

I called to the office of Farm Africa's Turmi branch one evening, where I spoke for a while with a quiet, but very intelligent young man of about my own age. So similar were his views on NGOs to my own that I quickly abandoned my questions on Farm Africa's work and asked him more about NGOs in general. He told me that in his opinion the biggest obstacle blocking Ethiopia's development is the culture of bribery which has poisoned high-level management of almost all industries here, including, worryingly, NGOs. He felt deeply ashamed of this fact.

Farm Africa have a policy of trying to implement any new project with the support and cooperation of the government, which he said greatly slows down everything, as they are more often than not barely interested in development projects for poor, rural areas. I asked him whether he thought this was all rather pointless, and he responded quickly that he thought that this was the best policy that Farm Africa has. When Farm Africa leave a project which has governmental backing it will continue, because the government are still there pushing it, and makes their work far more sustainable than other temporary projects that NGOs implement. It's certainly food for thought, and not something I had considered before. Certainly things must be painfully slow to push through using this method, and undoubtedly dubious methods must be used to make things happen, but if any NGO is to be worth its salt it must be able to leave a project working without its support and money, in my opinion.