On the Move in Cattle Country: Tracking Nomadic Pastoralists in Southwest Ethiopia

In the summer of 2017, our research team headed to Ethiopia’s remote lower Omo Valley, piloting methods to assess the health of nomadic pastoralists. The sun was still low at the time of day the Nyangatom people call esimokunyuk, meaning literally: “the ground squirrel is sweating.” Although only seven, perhaps 8 o’clock in the morning, already the sun beat the hard-packed earth and goats huddled together vying for the scant shade of thorn acacia trees as we searched for one of the Nyangatom’s cattle encampments to conduct interviews on maternal and child health