Glimpses of Life

So, the solution to the problem of not being able to take pictures in town / most places we go....

...steal other people's pics off of the internet. :D

This is a fairly typical village in the bush. When I talk about the village, this what most of the houses look like. The other traditional housing style here is a round mud hut with a grass roof, similar in size to these ones. Houses like the one we live in are referred to as "modern houses" In our case, that means concrete walls as and floors and a corrugated metal roof, fairly standard for a house in town. (Although some of the NGOs and the upper class have medditeranean style houses that are beautiful.)

Camels are used for meat and milk (and are the main source of food and livelyhood for the Somali peoples in the area), but they also double as pack animals. Those are pieces of house on its back, as most of the tribes in this area are traditionally semi nomadic, and a good number of people still tavel with their flocks or herds.

Herds of goats and sheep (shoats?) wander through town constantly, sometimes accompanied by a shepherd, sometimes just left to their own devices. Many shepherds are school aged boys who forego school in order follow the pastoral traditions of their tribe.

Somali elders often dye their beards (and sometimes eyebrows and hair) with hena. Originally, the orange color was a sign that they had been on hajj (pilgramige to Mecca), but, in Northeastern Province, it is generally just a sign of status with in the community.

The little girl is wearing a dira -- a traditional up-country dress.
The "skirt" that the boy on the left is wearing is a kikoi -- traditional garb among the up country males. Rebecca had an epifany shortly after getting here regarding the phrase in the Bible, "and he girded up his loins." Up-country guys do it all the time when they need to move more than a skirt would allow them. You reach for the back hem of the kikoi and pull it up between your legs so that it's up by your waist. *warning* If pulled too high, this can give short shorts / speedo effect. Not okay.

Depending on the family, girls from Islamic tribes start covering their heads somewhere between toddlerhood and early adolecence, normally with some sort of a loose scarf.

Once you are out in the villages (or around people who live in the village), it is rare to find women wearing a veil. Tradition only dictates that they cover with some sort of shawl. Some wear another, tighter, head covering underneath in order to prevent the hair from showing, but ninjas or solid colored samurais are generally only found in town.

This is the outer edge of the market where we buy most of our food, clothing, dishes, etc. At least once a week, a group comes here to buy team food for the week as well as any food that we will need at "the girls' house" for dinner. This portion of the market is quite open as far as head space goes, but part of the vegetable section is so low that we dubbed it "munchkin land" fairly quickly.

Punda cart delivering goods to be sold. These are everywhere and they can carry just about anything too big to take on the back of a bike. Honestly, I'm not sure how they got pictures of the market EMPTY, but I'm sure you can mentally paste a few dozen people into each photo...