by Dina Bennett
Omo Beauty Queens
OMO RIVER VALLEY, ETHIOPIA, 2011
It’s been a week since we reached Ethiopia’s Omo River Valley, and my standards of beauty, conduct, and dress are undergoing serious reshuffling. I have never been a slave to fashion, but I do clearly recall my mother’s horrified expression when, at the self-absorbed age of fourteen, I appeared for a visit to my effortlessly chic French cousin in Manhattan wearing a faded work shirt tucked into ragged bell-bottom jeans cinched with a fringed orange suede belt. It was the late 1960s, and in my longing to be a proper hippie, I was proud that I had been polite enough not to put a flower in my hair. And to tuck in my shirt.
Though at a loss for words, my mother’s shock was instantly visible. Her everyday facial tics went into overdrive, cheek muscles spasming her eyes into rapid blinks, the right corner of her mouth twitching downward, her fingers tapping at each other, thumb to forefinger, thumb to middle finger, thumb to ring finger, back and forth, back and forth. Finally, she said the words she knew would make me fume, “But darling, you can’t wear that into the city. You must change.” I glared hard enough for my hatred of social strictures to burn a hole in her Loewe quilted purse, then stomped back to my room where I put on the simple A-line skirt and light sweater which I knew, had always known, would meet with her approval.
Pico Iyer says, “Travel is like love, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed.” In this regard, I confess part of my heightened awareness falls on how different I am from those around me. There’s the obvious distinction that I am white and reasonably well-padded compared to those around me who usually are sinewy from hard work and darker skinned from various ethnicities other than Caucasian. And then there’s clothing, or lack thereof. I view outerwear as representative of all sorts of aspects of a person’s life. I’m not talking fashion. I’m talking such things as whether locals can afford a change of clothing, or how far away the standpipe is, where they can fill a five-liter peanut oil tub to cook food and wash cookware, clothing, themselves, plus water animals and a small garden if they are so fortunate.
The fact that I look so different from those around me screams, “outsider,” a state with which I am profoundly uncomfortable. Even in elementary school I was aware of my otherness; I knew that our mother who’d grown up in France dressed us differently, fed us differently, and organized our lives differently from everyone I knew. Things didn’t improve for me when I was switched from public to private school starting in seventh grade, bused from the suburbs while everyone else took the subway from midtown Manhattan, finding myself excluded from cliquish groups and clubs until I became one big bundle of yearning to belong.
When we travel, my inner child emerges, less along the lines of “playful” and more “please let me be one of you.” Despite this, you will never find me wearing a sari in India or a longyi in Myanmar. Wrapping myself in the local garments strikes me as the ultimate pretense. Residents dress to suit their needs, I dress to suit mine, always being sure to be respectful of religion and custom, in particular covering whatever parts of my body the local norms decree. This philosophy is particularly suitable in the Omo River Valley where, as it turns out, women are mostly naked.
As we drive along, I consider a Hamar woman walking the roadside. Her hair, in tight ringlets coated with the Omo’s ochre earth, glistens with fat that runs like greasy tears down under her jaw, staining rusty red the chunky steel band cinched around her neck. She is bare-breasted and stunningly beautiful, yet her torso displays a crisscross of large welts, which makes me wince. This is the ultimate insider versus outside moment, the welts a source of pride for her, testimony that she has been chosen for marriage in a centuries-old tradition in which women flagellate themselves with thorn branches as an act of devotion to their husband-to-be and his family. As an outsider I choose to leave my preconceived notions of “proper” and “acceptable” in exchange for an open mind about what is meaningful to those around me.
After six weeks in the north of Ethiopia, we’ve now reached the south, close to the border with Kenya. We’re driving orange dirt roads that curve over gently rounded hills spread with a lacy coverlet of thorny acacia trees, dipping down now and then for an abrupt crossing of a desiccated stream bed. The countryside is nearly barren, even though from a higher vantage point those acacias help it look impossibly green, surely home to a thriving human and animal population. In fact, green groundcover here is impossible, because rainfall in this southern region of Ethiopia is usually less than ten inches a year. Even ignoring lack of forage as cause for the absence of anything moving, most of the wildlife in the region is gone anyway, hunted to the brink of extinction by the local peoples to supplement dwindling livestock.
Omo tribes such as Mursi, Hamar, and Karo depend on the Omo River’s annual flood, which in turn depends on rains that fall to the north over Ethiopia’s western Shewa highlands. It’s this annual flood that enables farmers to cultivate maize and sorghum along the river banks and pastoralists to graze sufficient cattle for the nourishment of their milk, dung patties for their fires, and as livestock to sell or trade at market. This hand-to-mouth existence makes the river both secular lord and spiritual god, capriciously ruling the life and death of its dependents. While the river tribes may still believe in the river’s omnipotence, in truth the Ethiopian government now controls whether there’s a flood or not. Even when rainfall is good in the highlands, the upstream Gilgel Gibe III Dam captures the life-giving water and restrains it. The government has tied this lifeline into a deadly knot, squeezing it tight to prevent any errant drops from dribbling down the once flush riverbed. Arriving level with the deceptive greenery, I can see the policy’s impact as we raise broad plumes of pastel dust and skirt herds of bony cows heading to a shallow shrunken watering hole. The acacias are widely spaced on the salmon-colored earth, their thin brown trunks and spidery branches casting a filigreed shade over bleached blonde grass. It’s not lush at all. It’s parched.
Rolling the window down to let the hundred-degree air blow through the car, I decide this life is not for me. I like deodorant. I have a photofacial twice a year. I wash my hair if not daily, at least often enough to keep it from oozing like a piece of badly fried chicken. And then there’s the bare-breasted aspect of things. What would the supermarket bagger do faced with a naked me at the checkout counter, and all those frozen peas and canned tomatoes?
On the road, what people wear and how they live is the ultimate definer of their insiderness. Intent on getting beyond the nakedness, we stop in an Arbore hamlet of eight huts, set among the acacias. The arrival of our Land Rover generally is an event, but in this case no one runs over the hard-baked flat ground to greet us. The hamlet appears empty except for a pert-breasted young woman talking to a saggy-breasted old woman. They’re standing outside a stick and thatch hut that looks more like a slash heap, someone’s pile of kindling, than a home. I walk toward them, my place slow to give them time to adjust to the fact that a white woman with long straight brown hair dressed in quick-dry polyester pants, is approaching.
After the first awkward exchange of nods, waves, and smiles, I turn to Bernard and say, “Let’s see if we can look inside their hut.”
“Hmm,” he says. “Maybe. Well, um, no.” Bernard is more a stickler for polite reserve than I and is often chagrined by my unambivalent curiosity about others. My forwardness embarrasses him, until it gets us somewhere special and then he’s glad of it. Mostly though, I live with comments like, “Dina, you’re staring!” or “Dina, stop listening to them!” That I’m leaning dangerously close as I eavesdrop on strangers, or have lost track of our own conversation because I’m looking so intently at someone, is something I don’t even realize. I am so unreservedly curious about other people that I forget what I’m doing.
I have observed, though, that people, especially local people, also are intensely curious about us, and
also are looking for a way to extend our encounter. When customs are so foreign I can’t even get a toehold in something appropriate, I’ve learned that a compliment, no matter how vaguely offered, is always a good way to move to a next step. I smile and gesture at the hut, waving my hand around and doing my best to exude pleasure and approbation. This is a woman-to-woman thing, because every woman is house-proud. Whether an element of female solidarity arises or simply because they were heading there anyway, the women smile at my endorsement and motion us inside.
I expect to find one large room in which everyone lives and all activities take place. What I find instead is a thoughtfully laid out home. It’s not a McMansion, but it works. We enter the foyer, which in my childhood home was a carpeted entry filled with light from the sunporch, accented by a tall white clay vase with three stems of bird-of-paradise. They never died. They were plastic. That, however, was suburban Westchester County. In Arbore hut terms, foyer means a six-by-ten-foot area with food prep on one side, men’s and boys’ lounge on the other. The stick roof is barely six feet high, a lattice of leafy branches that provides speckled shade but also lots of light. No need for chandeliers or windows here. The airy lattice that works as a roof is also used for the walls, making windows irrelevant while keeping out intrusive gazes as effectively as a suburban fence.
Like women the world over, I’m most curious about the kitchen. To me, because food sustains life, a kitchen, no matter how meager or lavish, is the center of all households. It’s always been the center of mine. During our years in Boulder, it was a place where Bernard and I would have a quiet pre-dawn breakfast going over the day’s plans before heading to our office in town. It was also the scene of an informal parade of meals with friends, family, and neighbors. During our fifteen years on the ranch, it’s where I learned how to prepare the elk, goose, and occasional beaver Bernard had dispatched to our deep freezer, and where I cooked three meals a day due to the absence of anywhere to go out to eat except a bowling alley in the tiny county seat, population 560, sixteen miles down the road.
Now, I peer discreetly about, wondering what an Arbore woman uses to cook, though the more salient question should have been what food does she have to prepare. The chief’s wife, a crone of indeterminate age with polished mahogany skin and a head of sparse hair neatly woven into around fifty tiny braids, comes over, nodding her head in greeting. She kneels in front of a shallow granite mortar. Sprinkling a handful of millet, she puts her shoulder to the task of making flour, scraping the pestle back and forth along its length. Her breasts swing in time to her movement. They’re not cantaloupes; more like giant brown bean pods on a windy day.
I stand still, sweating like that proverbial pig, while she works, not a drop of perspiration beading her thin upper lip. I swear never again to take for granted those microwavable dinners in my freezer, organic or otherwise. Besides the mortar and pestle, the only other items for food prep and storage are a couple of plastic bottles and a few large gourds. In the lounge, the males of the group concentrate on what men do best while women slave in the kitchen—lying around on the charpoy and laughing. They chew on sticks, shove each other on the shoulder, talk and shout. Charpoy is Hindi for couch, and apart from the absence of a flatscreen TV, there’s only one difference between these guys and their American counterparts shooting the breeze on a Sunday afternoon: no one here has a big belly.
Stooping under an opening about four feet high, we enter a windowless, high-ceilinged space, part of the hut proper. This is where the cooking and eating are done. There’s enough smoke from smoldering embers that my eyes sting, causing rapid blinking of the sort which would make me think I’d lost my glasses. If I wore them. I can barely make out the ebony-skinned chief in a nearby corner. This black on black is great for a painting at the Guggenheim, but in here it creates difficulties. It’s useless to don my attentive expression when no one can notice it. The one benefit of being in this shadowland is that no one can see the stains spreading on my super-lightweight, quick-dry shirt, as sweat slicks my armpits and drizzles from the back of my knees down my calves.
In the pervasive shadow of the room, the chief’s arm appears, bony finger crooked, beckoning me forward. But there are hot coals somewhere on the floor and I have no desire to be a firewalker, never having believed in the benefits of singed soles, so I skirt the densest plume of smoke to get close enough to the chief to see what he wants me to see. He’s squatting on a tiny stool, but not just any old stool. He smacks his chest to tell me it’s his personal stool then raises himself a few inches off it so he can thump it up and down, illustrating it never leaves that particular spot. He’s the chief and he sits where he wants, evidently always in the same place. His wife’s stool, lower than his of course, is set beside him, but is allowed to move around. This is clever, as without such a decree, she’d never be able to cook and serve him. And it’s not worth being a chief if you’re not going to be waited on.
Standing, he hoists his ranking seat out from under his bottom and displays it for us to admire. It’s a three-legged affair with a roughly sawn slab of tree trunk about butt-wide tacked on for a seat. Still, in a place where most have nothing but dirt to sit on, being the possessor of the high chair, low though it may be, is a thing of which the old gentleman is rightly proud and protective. He puts it carefully back in its spot, implying “Mess with my chair, and you mess with me.”
Behind him, he gestures by placing his hands palm to palm and holding them alongside his cheek, is his bedroom. This is private, shared only by his wife. Separated from his room by a cloth is a similar sized space for his children and their spouses. And next to that is the room for unmarried girls and children. The chief’s suite has a ragged floor mat, woven from grasses. That was it. At least I think that was it, what with the blurry view of my tearing eyes and the distraction of my perspiring body parts. Regardless, I stayed patient and attentive, and indeed I thought I managed the heat and smoke reasonably well, going with the flow even when what was flowing was me. Not so Bernard. He became desperate, wiping globules of sweat from his cheeks while uttering pointed statements about how it was now time to move back outside. No one paid him any attention, continuing our mimed discussion of the relative height of stools and the merits of pushing the pestle versus pulling it. I knew why he wanted to get outside, and it had nothing to do with his disinterest in food prep or manly lounging. Through the walls I’d noticed a knot of village women peering intently at the lattice, hoping to glimpse the visitors … us. Strikingly handsome, necks draped in the tribe’s signature necklaces of long strands of beads in primary colors, they are a photographer’s dream. And Bernard is nothing if not a photographer at heart.
I’m happy with our hot little tour. There’s a nice voyeuristic element to it which appeals to my inner Peeping Tom. At home I always look into windows when I walk down a neighborhood street. If someone wishes to promenade bare-assed while I walk by, that is their decision and no reason for me to avert my eyes. Of course, nakedness in suburbia has different connotations from in the Omo. Here, naked promenading is normal; it’s finding any Arbore fully clothed that would be cause for staring.
Divine Intervention
PEMAYANGSTE MONASTERY, SIKKIM, INDIA, 2009
Three weeks of driving through India has placed us in a novel situation: we have a private driver. The signs leading up to this were unmistakable. No longer was Bernard sanguine in the face of an onslaught of vehicles, whether with two wheels or twelve, all honking. No longer did he chuckle at the obstacle course of moving machinery through which he threaded our car. Now from the moment we sailed out of a parking lot into morning traffic he was cursing, growling at the clutch, clenching the steering wheel. I didn’t need the bland statistic that India has the highest traffic death rate of all countries in the world to make me clench my teeth. I realized I was holding my breath only when I suddenly felt faint and a rush of air escaped my lungs.
So it was that after reaching Mussoorie, the onetime ho
me of Sir George Everest, we abandoned our rally loaner car, hopped a flight from Delhi to Bagdogra Airport, and hired a driver to accompany us into the hill country of Darjeeling and Sikkim. Sitting in the back seat and holding hands with Bernard, leaning slightly toward each other despite a smooth drive, is my current idea of heaven.
That was four days ago. By the time we enter Sikkim, we have ditched Driver #1 as too slow and are on Driver #2, an enterprising and robust man who handles the steering wheel as if he were plowing a field with a brace of oxen. That Driver #2 is a bit too fond of his evening entertainment, and likes to hug the sharp corners of Sikkim’s serpentine roads as if he were clutching a lady of the night, has made me uneasy. It’s one thing for him to let two wheels skirt an abyss if he wishes to meet his maker; it’s quite another for him to take us with him.
This miscalculation of what it would be like to have someone drive us around isn’t our only obstacle today. An unseasonable fog has enveloped Sikkim’s highlands in a damp, chilly veil. By all rights, we should have a spectacular view of the snowy slopes of Kangchenjunga, the world’s third highest peak. Instead, the horizon is obscured by thick, smoky mist, and though I sniff the light breeze, I don’t pick up even a whiff of a village campfire.
We’re here to visit to Pemayangtse Monastery, one of the oldest and most revered monasteries, sometimes called gompas, of Tibetan Buddhism. Below me, elongated prayer flags in autumn colors line the dirt road, undulating in that breeze, their brisk flapping like so much applause for my arrival. Above me, I can make out low white-washed walls hugging a large, brightly painted, square building. A crumbling cement stairway bisects the wall, inviting me to advance but to watch my step. Even to an atheist like me, it feels serene and sacred.
