At night time, a village in southern Ethiopia is romantic

The Hamer Tribe’s homes are wooden-and-straw huts surrounded by circular wooden fences

In the hut, they cook, eat, and sleep; the fenced-in area serves as their yard and living room

At night, they gather in this area and talk, sing, laugh. One night, we pitched tents in one such yard and slept on the ground

Before going to sleep, we sat in the yard with the hut’s residents, a family with two adolescent girls. The father was gone, either out with his animals or staying with another wife

There were no lights in the sky and it was quiet. Our hosts giggled with each other and we could hear the insects buzzing around

In the distance, we could hear the clapping and chanting of a nearby village

For our hosts and the village’s other residents, the world hardly exists beyond here. They do not go to school. They do not go away to work. Most do not even know who the president of their country is, let alone what it means for us to have come from “America”

Our guide, who grew up in the only nearby city, said there likely was not a single figure – Jesus, Hitler, Donald Trump – of whom we and our hosts both knew

The women sometimes go to the market, at most once a week. The men will be gone for months at a time, taking their flocks of cows or goats across the bush in search of food and water

But they must always come back, and regardless of where they’ve been or what they’ve seen, they must observe the tribe’s customs

Sleep was horrible: The ground was hard and the goats outside our tents started bleating before the sun was up

Once it had risen, our hosts did too. We joined them in their hut for coffee, made out of murky river water and boiled coffee bean shells

Then there was shouting

Outside, we could hear a group approaching the hut. A man entered and greeted the matriarch, then barked an order at her two adolescent girls, who proceeded outside

Another man then searched the hut – peaking in the chest, under the blanket, and in the “attic” created by a wooden platform above our heads – and went back outside, where 20 or so men had gathered near the two girls

The men pulled out long branches and began using them to whip the girls

Over and over, they cracked the whips against the girls, who grimaced but hardly reacted. As they did so, their mother whooped and cheered, clapping and laughing

The men continued to whip, until the girls’ backs were cracked and bloodied. After a minute, they stopped

The girls came back inside; the men hurried off toward another hut, maybe 150 yards away

As they approached, a woman ran out and in the opposite direction. The men initially gave chase, then gave up. They turned and went toward another hut, which they searched. They apparently didn’t find any young women and began a walk toward a distant hut

Our guide said he had never seen this before, and we ran up to the men to ask what they were doing

Local girls had been committing transgressions, the men said. They were disrespecting the tribal code and culture

How specifically?

Girls had been trying to go to school

They had also been talking about moving to town, wearing pants and other Western clothes. They needed to be kept in line, the men said

This was the men’s way of enforcing the tribal order: They periodically go home to home, whipping the young women

The whipping is preemptive. The girls hadn’t yet done anything wrong, but enough girls were violating the code that others needed to be reminded of the consequences

Here, people survive as a tribe. We happened to see one of the many ways that is enforced

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Our next report – in the Balkans – starts tomorrow. After that, we’ll be back in Africa