This is the strangest tribe in the Omo Valley!
THE WORLD IS IN THE OMO VALLEY IN ETHIOPIA 🇪🇹
A week away from all comforts. That was our week in the OMO Valley, Ethiopia. This is the price to pay to explore the tribes of southern Ethiopia and their ways of life.
We spent a week immersed in tribal culture, visiting eight of the tribes that live in the OMO Valley.
This valley has a cultural richness that is hard to beat, and being able to see these ethnic groups, preserved and with ancestral ways of life, is a privilege.
The world has undergone sudden changes and, especially in recent decades, ancestral ways of life have been disappearing, being replaced by an increasingly homogeneous society without much identity.
The OMO Valley is the antithesis of all this. There, tribes that live less than 100 km from each other do not mix, do not marry each other, do not make contact, and live in distinct ways.
The world outside the Omo Valley seems even more homogeneous than the world inside.
There we saw tribes that paint themselves with mud to beautify themselves. We saw tribes where women cut their lower lips to insert discs, probably to make themselves less attractive to neighboring tribes.
We saw tribes where women comb their hair with mud, thus displaying their married status.
We saw wedding rituals where men jump naked over cows, women are whipped on the back until they bleed, and brides cover themselves in mud six months before getting married.
We saw tribes where we had to drink strange beverages to be able to enter, wear traditional clothing, or even pay homage to ancestors.
The Omo Valley has the world within, and seeing this world was urgent for us. An urgency that half the world's population hasn't yet realized, but that is already happening. These peoples are disappearing, and those who value the planet's cultural diversity must run…
Run… because they are disappearing!