They giggled behind their hands at our pale skin, our watery eyes, our bizarre clothing. In this barefoot, bare-assed and bare-breasted company, I felt I had arrived a trifle overdressed.
We pitched our camp in the grounds of the mission
church, watched by hordes of spectators. Later, when I went for a stroll
through the village, I came upon a woman sitting on a log outside her house.
She was stretching her lower lip with a mixture of charcoal and butter. In all
the sad history of crippling female adornment, from bound feet to suffocating
corsets, nothing quite compares to the lip plate worn by the Surma and the
Morsi women of the Omo Basin.
Stanley Stewart (to
be continued)
