Hamer Village, Omo Valley, Ethiopia

In this round hut made of sticks and straw, smoke stirs the smell of a contintent. I’m sitting cross-legged atop a dried goatskin, its hard edges sharp and curling away from the packed-earth floor. A few inches above my head, a rack of horizontal sticks holds the dark bases of kalabasha gourds, the only household items. Through the suspended shelf’s cracks, beyond the gourds, I see the underside of the thatch roof. The blue smoke swirls against it.

The smoke rises from a small wood fire smoldering without flame on six inches of coals piled between three angular rocks, also blackened. The coals heat a round jug of fire-darkened clay the size of a beach ball. Steam curls out of the black hole at the top. The steam comes from the boiling coffee pulled by a ladle into this hut’s twelve-foot-diameter circle punctured by gray, slanting light.

Milio, age 35, holds the ladle, moving it quickly and smoothly through the kettle’s narrow opening and tilting the dark brown brew into a halved gourd that is textured and black like the tops of the father’s hands that take the gourd and turn it up to mouth then place it between bare feet planted on hard, orange-tan dirt at the edge of a goat hide. Two men, both elders, share the skin, their knees bent, wrapped in arms as straight as bone, the dark skin tight across the top and sagging slightly below from gravity and time like damp, fitted sheets on a clothes line. The smoke moves and crosses their faces, dulling the oily glow shining off the cheekbones and foreheads that pull away from the golden-gray eyes in wrinkles like desert geology seen through a plane window.

They drink again from their kalabashas and spray the last bit of saliva and coffee onto my face, their countenances serious and unchanged. I sip my coffee and spray back, attempting the same exaggerated spewing sound. Their faces break and they laugh with straight, white teeth. Milio’s hand keeps moving the ladle, stirring the coffee and refilling gourds. Smoke expands behind her like a white screen of pulled cotton around her head of braided rows that fall like a hundred bracelets of beads colored red-brown and glistening with the rock powder and animal fat paste used as decoration by Hamer women. Her right shoulder faces me with its pattern of small vertical scars in horizontal bands that cross from the back of her arm onto the upper back and over the shoulder blade. She doesn’t smile. She squats, her short goat-skin skirt’s tail blending into the goat-skin mat below her. This is her house and she sleeps where she cooks.

A toddler, naked below a necklace of white shells, crawls over her bent legs, his dusty bottom round, his soft thick legs pumping upward as if climbing an invisible ladder, trying to push the chubby, dust-colored face closer to a nipple that falls low and to the side. The ladling motion disrupts his progress and he slips down then angles for another attempt. His lips grip and his body stills for a few swallows before sliding back down to goat skin and bare feet and blackened gourds and dirt packed with coffee, sweat, semen, corn, cow shit, breath, blood, and ash. All in this ribbed, circling hut that exhales smoke into the world like a breathing fossil in raised relief.