Meet Guri from the Arbore tribe. Guri, like all Arbore women, wears a black veil over her shaved head. The shaving of the head is a sign of virginity, a condition she must maintain until she gets married. As part of the wedding process Guri will have to be circumcised. She will be held down by her mother while her clitoris is cut, and she will then become a real Arbore woman. After this brutal ceremony, she will have to stay indoors for a couple of months. If she does not follow this tradition she will be forever shun by other Arbore who will insult her by saying she is a dirty Hamer woman. But for now Guri is enjoying being a girl. Balancing her studies at the nearby school with her chores at home which entail collecting water from a nearby pond and taking care of her family's goats.
Meet Nania and her son Koro from the Mursi tribe. Nania like most Mursi women likes to wear her lip plate on special occasions. Nania lives in a small hamlet deep in the Mago National Park far away from any reliable source of water. For this reason life in the village can be very hard, especially during the dry season. Nania owns a couple of cows which she milks daily to feed her family. She never boils the milk as she believes that in doing so all the cattle in the village would be cursed and die. Instead she keeps the milk in dirty plastic bottles, given to her by people traveling through the area. The bottles of milk are scattered around inside her warm hut; sometimes for days before it's consumed. Needless to say, this practice, coupled with dirty drinking water from nearby puddles, result in chronic bowel problems for Nania and many other people in the area.
Meet Nachuna and her son Olabile from the Surma tribe. Nachuna runs her own household and owns her own fields. She is free to spend the profits from the crops as she whishes as opposed to women in other more male dominated tribes. Nachuna sometimes wears a lip plate. At the point of puberty she had her bottom teeth removed in order to get the lower lip pierced. Once the lip was pierced, it was stretched and a lip plate was inserted in the hole of the piercing. She, like all Surma women, sees this as sign of beauty. The size of the lip plate also indicates her value in cattle on the day of her wedding day. The bigger the plate, the more valuable she becomes.
