Wednesday, February 1. Mursi Tribe.

We ran into some Mursi boys before we got to the village...


Body painting is done by many of them, and, yes, clothes are optional...


The Mursi are most known for their lip plates, which requires the lip to be cut away from the face and pulled looser and looser by larger and larger plates. There are many different speculations as to why the Mursi women do this. One of them is that they started doing this when the Europeans were kidnapping them for the slave trade, and that they did this to disfigure themselves so that the Europeans would not want to take them (but this is only a speculation...not a confirmed fact). It is now considered a thing of beauty by members of the tribe. After photographing this woman, she sold me her lip plate...


Another ritual that the Mursi are known for is scarification, which you can see down this man's chest and on his arm. Scarification is accomplished by cutting and letting it form a scar...it may require cutting over and over again to get the scar to look as one would want it to look. This ritual is also done by the women and is considered as a thing of "beauty" (like body piercing? or tattoos? by some in our culture?)...


A boy in the village next to one of their very short huts...


Another thing that they do is train their ear lobes to stretch to accommodate bigger and bigger discs, such as seen on this woman (I see young people in our culture also starting to do something similar to this called "tunneling").


...this little girl was precious with all of her decorative paraphenalia she had accumulated...


...and this old man had his own version of a lip plate (bowl?)....and sported a headdress of what looked liked lemons...


There were babies and children everywhere you turned in Ethiopia (someone in the geoup reported that over 50% of the population here is under 17 years old)...


After photographing members of the Mursi tribe (and again, they badgered us for money, and apparently the money goes to the men to buy liquor....this part of the touring was quite disheartening...you wouldn't mind so much if the money was going into a fund to build a new well or something like that)...anyway, we then headed to an Ari village which was close-in to the town in which we were staying, compared to the Mursi village which was quite a distance from the town. The construction of their houses was also much more advanced...


This is the distilling contraption which is used to make the local liquor (which they then sell to the Mursi men when they come into town)...


Then this woman demonstrated the making of clay pottery platters. Starting with a ball of clay...


...she then starts to flatten it with her hand...


...and within minutes, she has made a perfectly round platter with rounded edges.


Then we watched the blacksmith at work...


...the kids appeared to be mesmerized by the blacksmith, but I think it was probably more of an interest in the American people who had arrived to visit them...














One of the little girls was jumping rope with a vine she had made. She couldn't believe me when I said I knew how to do it. So I offered to show her..


...they were especially impressed when I went into boxing training speed mode...


Here are some more village views as we departed...








...to return to the Jinka Lodge for our second night there. It was rare on this trip to spend more than one night anywhere, so two nights in the same place was a nice respite.

Our trip is quickly coming to an end..just a couple of more days left before we're back in Addis Ababa.

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Location:Omo Valley, Ethiopia