Place: Omo Valley, Ethiopia
Time: June 15, 2016
As I child I would look down the basement stairs. I would stand at the top in blue eyed terror. For I knew that creatures were living down there, conspiring to kill me, the young blonde heir. They lived off a dripping faucet, and can goods my mother foolishly stored down there. I could hear them whisper. It was the way the furnace moaned. And the silence, like mold. It was quiet. Too quiet. They gave themselves away. And there were others sounds. Some I knew. Others I knew didn't belong in this house. In my house. I thought about telling my parents. They wouldn't believe me though. Yet at the top of stairs I would stand. Too frightened to descend. Too frightened to move. My eyes watered with fear. On my skinny pink arms bumps. Bumps without a name. They never showed their faces however. I was too close to the back door. I could escape. They knew I would escape. So they would wait. Patiently wait. Down there. In the basement.
There were creatures under the bed as well. But I out smarted them. With a running leap into the sheets at night, I flew through the air. They couldn't grab my white ankles bedside that way and pull me under. And there I made my stand. Armoured with blankets, monster proof. Pulled up to my chin. I waited through the night. And though fear kept me awake, I had a friend. The air purifier. It hummed. The monsters hated the hum. And there was a light. Orange. It glowed through the night.
Like a friendly beacon, it kept the monsters away. I watched it until fatigue took me away, to awake in streaming sunlight.
I grew up.
I found out there were no monsters at all. Not under the bed. No, not even in the basement. And the back of the closets held no magical portholes to take me to different worlds. Searches for hidden doors in the attic proved also fruitless. And passages to magical lands didn't exist……….
…………..until this morning.
There is a land so distant and remote that it might as well be mythical. And the beings who inhabit this place are so strange and far removed from our western culture as to be from another dimension. I discovered this magical land not at the foot of my bed, nor in my closet, but with a magical machine called a “jeep” that bore me away through endless jungle roads to where these inhabitants live.
Way, way far away, tucked up in the mountains and lush jungles of the Omo region, live a people called the Mursi. And here are a few photos of them...
