THE EGG VENDOR
Turmi, Ethiopia 2013
A market is serious business. A time to sell and earn a bit of cash. The market was filled with Hamar people. The women wore leather skirts and vests. Their hair had been dressed with red mud. Red ochre dripped down to color their backs and inevitably their hands. Some men wore the traditional goatskin leather tunic over a pair of shorts. Some men wore shorts and t-shirts, but all had their hair dressed in the fanciful Hamar style with a feather and a browband of beads.
This woman was carefully setting her eggs on the ground, one by one. She’d reach into the gourd (on the left in the photo) and ever so gently and slowly bring an egg out to add to her small display. Her movements, so careful and deliberate, told me that the money that each egg would bring was vital to her. If an egg slipped and broke while she was extracting them from her gourd, she’d have that much less money. She never took her eyes off her task even though I stood over her waiting for the moment when her arms with their colorful bracelets would cross.
She had carried her eggs to market in the orange gourd with the leather strap. Imagine how carefully she had held that gourd as she walked.
CHINESE EGG CARTON
China 2006…Yunnan Province
I shot this photo of a Chinese style “egg carton” a long time ago. This is the first time I’ve shown it, but I’ve never forgotten the cleverness of it. These farmers were H’mong, an ethnic minority in southwest China. They were wonderful basket makers. I’m sure it took some woman only a few minutes to fashion this “egg carton” from rice stalks which she’d then place in the large basket that hung on her back. (That’s the basket you see in the photo.) She could go to market confident that her eggs would not get broken.