Young Suri boy in Omo Valley

Young Suri boy at a ceremony in Kibish, Omo Valley, Ethiopia.

In Tulgit and Kibish you find many children by the riverbank waiting for photos in the afternoon. The kids, mostly boys, paint themselves, and sometimes also decorate themselves with flowers, blossoms and green plants they can find everywhere around the villages.

However, as nice as it looks, this kind of body painting or the decoration with the flowers is not an old tradition, you cannot see it in remote Suri villages. The children are doing it for photos and for getting a little money. But anyway: it is beautiful and funny. Especially the boys are very creative, they climb any tree they find and make bizarre faces or funny poses just to attract the tourists for a photo.