2/6/10; 2/17/10; 2/19/10; 3/2/10: BEST OF AMBOSELI

Jambo! Jambo bwana! Habari gani! Mzuri sana!

That is the first line of that “Them Mushrooms” song I was telling you about earlier in the . . . month. Sorry for being so neglectful! After we got back from Tsavo, we went pretty much directly into finals, which fried my little brain like a chapati (delicious East African tortilla-equivalent). And then we had to move out of our bandas to make room for the Tanzanians, who proceeded to invade our camp and defeat us by a very slight margin in the Olympics. And then I went to sleep and woke up in Tanzania with my hands tied with a bandana and covered in bees . . . luckily my classmates were with me or I’m not sure what I would have done. But that’s another post! Or several (also, that last part, the part with the bees, didn’t happen). Right now, since I’m in The Amazing New Zone of Almost coNstant Internet Access (T.A.N.Z.A.N.I.A.), I’m going to take this opportunity to show-and-tell you all about Amboseli National Park, the centerpiece of the Tsavo-Amboseli Ecosystem and probably, despite encounters in Tsavo and KBC and around the group ranches, of most of my memories of Kenyan wildilfe.

We went to Amboseli four times over the course of the semester, and I took a whole lot of pictures. So here are some of them, along with the stories that were happening when they were taken (the sad part is that, by necessity, the photographer misses part of the story because she is busy taking pictures so that she can better remember/tell what she saw of the story later. But hopefully between the words and the pictures some decent account will emerge, although of course you all just should have been here, and then none of this would be necessary, jeez).

The drive into Amboseli is about 45 minutes of straight red dirt road. The animals like hanging out in the park because it’s about 400 square kilometers of farmless and fenceless space (53% grassland, 22% woodland, 25% swamp! an oft-repeated fact and a favorite of Shem’s), but they don’t know where the park’s borders are, so the drive in is often interrupted by giraffes or zebras or elephants heading out into the surrounding group ranches, probably to try to eat some pumpkins or something. Like these guys:





We encountered all of them on our final visit, the elephant on the way in and the zebras on the way out. At the beginning of the program, our professors said at the beginning of the program that by the time we left Kenya we’d be so tired of elephants we’d never want to see another one again . . . halfway through, though, and they’re still bringing us to seatbelt-necessitating halts (I’ve still got a bruise from the slingshot maneuver Molly pulled when we saw that elephant, I think).

After the road, you get to the gate! Here’s where we get accosted by mamas and other hawkers. And sometimes . . . ACTUAL HAWKS!


This guy was wheeling above us for a while, and occasionally landing at the very top of acacias to survey his domain. By the way, he is actually not a hawk. He is a martial eagle. But! There was a pun to be made, and so I made it.
This was on our first visit and we were all very overwhelmed and excited. My dominant feeling (which I still sometimes get here) was that someone had taken over my optic nerve and was photoshopping amazing things into my field of vision. Even though we weren’t in the park yet, my friends here seem to agree:



(on the ground, from closest to farthest away: Becca, Suzzane (blue shirt), Coral (awesome shades), a mama accosting Coral, Clinton (with camera), and Sam. In the faroff cruiser, from the left: Ian, Jen and Olivia. In the closeup cruiser, from the left: Ryan, Amanda, Mambo, and Christine).

On that first day, we were ostensibly there to start a Wildlife Management exercise that involved keeping track of social organization and behavior of large mammals. Of course, we mostly ended up driving around and gaping at things and then remembering after the fact that we were supposed to write them down. According my notebook, that day we saw a lonely warthog, four elephants, some fighting impala, and a large colony of baboons, including one Mickey Mouse-eared baby:



Other highlights of that first trip included: when, in order to turn around in the rotary associated with a defunct lodge, Daniel drove us through a curtain of dangling electric wires at full speed with the hatches open (twice!); when Daniel’s car broke down (this happened so often over the course of the program that we started blocking time into field exercises for car repair . . . alright, I’m exaggerating. But it happened pretty often. “Maasai don’t need to know how to drive” etc. etc.) so we had to quickly disperse into the three other cars while Harrison, our mechanic, fixed it up in said rotary; when Jordan’s mammal field guide fell off the roof of the car and Mambo had to jump out of the car and bravely fetch it; and, finally, when we drove through the swamp and spotted a rare saddle-billed stork and my camera, in a spectacular show of encouraging me to live in the moment, ran out of battery. So you’re out of luck on that one. But if you google it I’m sure someone else has taken a picture at some point!

The second time we went to Tsavo was for Wildlife Management again, this time to do a mammal-counting exercise that led to lab analysis of species’ habitat preferences within the park. We split into groups, and each group was given a section of the park (also known as a transect) and instructed to count all the mammals while keeping track of the habitat types (because this is SCIENCE, it was slightly more complicated than that, but that was the general idea). Moses, who had taken a break from running the duka to be our driver, decided that it would be best to take on our transect by circling it clockwise and always counting out the right side. I believe we counted around twenty animals over the course of two hours. Meanwhile, on our left side, in another transect, this party was happening:



As you can imagine (and as my ratio of left-to-right pictures proves), it was kind of hard to pay attention to the correct side of the road.
Since we were not invited to the swamp bonanza, it was lucky that our group happened to meet one particular small carnivore whose ministrations were much more heartfelt than the fickle showboating of those big overdramatic grazers and browsers. Amboseli’s manmade water distribution system (necessary for rainy season drainage) has some culverts that necessitate the occasional small bridge, and as we were driving over one, we stalled out quickly to take pictures of a passing Grey-Crowned Crane:



A few minutes later, as we revved up the engine to start out again, the noise scared this guy out from under the bridge:



We all hung out for a while, looking at each other (sometimes, you know, words just aren’t necessary). Then, after we were done with our transect, we stopped by a few more times to say hi. He was always under the bridge, and he always ran out when he heard us rumble over. (except once, when we caught him picking over a pile of nearby bones). We named him Troll, after the story about the billy goats. I have a lot more pictures of him . . . he was an excellent model.
That was also the day we interrupted one elephant’s shower and got sprayed:



And, soon after, ticked off another elephant and got trumpeted at:



Maybe that’s why we don’t get invited to parties.

Trip #3 I actually largely described in my second-to-last blog post, as it was the day of the cultural manyatta and Serena Lodge. One thing I failed to mention about that day (on purpose! ha! SECRETS SECRETS ARE SUCH FUN) was our encounter with A LION:



Psych! That’s a concerned Cape buffalo (but I wanted to put that picture up just because. It was strange, during the incidental game drive over to the manyatta I actually took better pictures of animals than on either of the earlier, wildlife-centric trips). This is the real lion:



As with Troll, I have many more pictures of Neville Chamberlain (I named him this because we were all pretty sure he was going to attack a carful of German tourists). As we were driving to the manyatta, we found a large clump of cars all pulled over and filled with tiny gesticulating silhouettes sticking out through the tops. This is generally a good sign in a national park. It is also why, if you are a group of wanafunzi (students) who have a strange aversion to the very watali (tourists) who are keeping the ecosystems you have come to love alive with their extravagent spending habits (hint: despite efforts against these instincts, we are such wanafunzi), when you see something cool, you pull over very quietly, and point often and extravagantly at the sky, so that all the safari vehicles that come by think you’re looking at birds and move on.

We joined the fray, followed everyone’s line of sight, and were treated to two lions, a young adult male and female, on some kind of first date under a big acacia. This was our second lion sighting, and our best at the time – during our second trip, Mambo somehow spotted a few lionesses and some cubs dozing at the edge of the woodlands much too far away for pictures. Through binoculars you could see the yellows of these guys’ eyes, so we were very excited. And then, when boy lion decided he’d had enough and got up and headed towards the road, we were very VERY excited. And then when he looked like he was about to rear right through the front window of the German tourist vehicle we got kind of scared. But then he just crossed the road, like he was in a bad joke or something, and proceeded to mark his territory on the other side. An even more effective message than an attack, in some ways. So that was our first male lion – check out that half-mane! – and our closest one as of then, and we chattered about it all the way to the manyatta, where the most exciting animals were donkeys:



p.s. that girl with the donkeys is the infamous Coral.

Then we went to Serena Lodge, home of the fearless hungry vervets:



In the backpack, teasing the monkey: Lia. In the background, reacting in various ways: Chelsea (in blue, acting calm), Olivia (in white, despairing), Sam (in maroon, ready for action) and Jen (in orange, shocked).

Our forth trip to Amboseli was techinically for a traveling lecture, but we ended up at Serena Lodge again somehow. Before that, though, we found ourselves on Observation Hill, where we ate our lunches/saved them from superb starlings, which look regal and shiny but act like their scrappy cousins. Here is one in flight!



From the hill, we spotted a hippo! So we went closer to investigate, and he found us rather boring, or perhaps tasty:



One really cool thing about seeing animals in the wild instead of in zoos: many of them hang out in large herds. On several instances we saw hundreds of elephants at a time, all shifting and blotting out the horizon. Here’s a smaller group, soccer-team sized and able to fit in my camera lens:



The first couple of pictures were also from that fourth day. And so is this last one, of Kilimanjaro, handsome overlord of all Kenyan parks and students, draped in one of many storms he sent our way that day:



Well, that was Amboseli. Someday I’ll go back. Next up, my week at Tsavo West, Amboseli’s older, tanglier cousin who has pet leopards. Depending on how long it takes me to upload this one, that next one might have pictures too! If it’s not feasible though I can just show you guys later. I miss you all!

p.s. the picture quality did not turn out so large or so good. So hopefully I'll get to show you the originals at some point because they are less grainy because my camera is (/my parents are) awesome.

3/3/10: WE HAVE NOT HAD INTERNET FOR DAYS AND SO TODAY I AM POSTING TWO BLOGS FROM A LITTLE WHILE AGO

Habari siku everybody? I am doing pretty darn mzuri myself. Keeping a little busier than I’m used to . . . we have finals in a couple of weeks, and before that we are going to camp in Tsavo National Park (Proud Former Sponsors of Special Terrifying Sub-Breed of Man-Eating Lions) for five nights, so our professors are somehow managing to fit all of our classes and assignments into this small space of time. We’ve also been going heavier on the Swahili because more and more of our field exercises involve us going into town and asking the locals questions, and while we have translators, it’s always better to be able to keep track of things yourself, and we’re more likely to be taken seriously if we can at least get by conversationally. Today we split into groups and interviewed farmers and ranchers in Mbirikani Group Ranch, located slightly north of (and set up slightly differently than) Kimana Group Ranch, where our camp is located. Clinton, Jordan and I were led around by our translator, Titus, who is himself a farmer in Mbirikani. Titus was full of fun facts (did you know that elephants are completely crazy about pumpkins? if you catch one in your pumpkin patch, don’t try to scare it away, because it’ll charge rather than stop eating), made me think very seriously about certain phrases in the English language (he used “wow” as a conversational placeholder, rather than your standard “ok” or “yes”, and whenever he wanted to imply that someone was benefitting from something, he said they were “receiving the cake”), and had the only pen that didn’t give up the ghost when we got caught in a Kenya-style torrential downpour (Speedo-brand, go figure).

Right, by the way, it’s the rainy season now. It’s a hazily defined time period, especially in the past few years, as climate change has noticeably tossed up the weather patterns here. But personally I’m considering yesterday its official beginning, and I think I’ll remember the date forever because it was probably one of the best days I’ve ever had. The morning was pretty normal – cook crew, classes, bananagrams between classes, actual bananas during class to stay awake (the bananas here are little and green and covered in banana-scars and about ten thousand times better than American bananas) – and sunny, as usual. The nice weather carried over into the afternoon, which we had all put aside for the first round of the student-organized B.A.M.F. (Ballistic Antagonistic Mwana-Funzis) Volleyball Cup. The opening set (we play 3 games per set, 21 points per game) pitted the Totally Titillating Tomes against Shockingly Shem, and the first half was your average, albeit particularly adrenaline-charged, KBC volleyball game, except that all the students and most of the staff came out to watch, and we had a referee with a whistle and thrown-together uniforms. I decked myself out in facepaint made of sink-made mud, which was labor-intensive, because the soil here doesn’t hold water (if you are interested in why that is/its implications for the environment and effects on local livelihoods, ask me! we spent a whole class on it) but I should have just waited, because half an hour into the tournament, the sky fuzzed over, then got heavy, and then before we knew what had hit us we were all already drenched. But what kind of aspiring field scientists would we be if we let a few inches of rain drive us inside? Well, I’d tell you, but I didn’t get the chance to find out, because WE PLAYED ON. Thunder here lasts for straight minutes, and when you’ve got a storm cloud above you the lightning shows up in it over and over like a backbone. The askaris moved to the (covered) chumba porch and drank chai and watched us make hippos of ourselves. By the time my team, Daniel’s Destroyers (Of Your Political House), took on the Killer Kiringes for the second set, the court was a mud pit and my improvised warm-up regiment (mudwrestling, mud fighting, mud throwing, cartwheel attempts) had apparently left me looking like a Viet Cong member.
The Killer Kiringes managed to come back and eke out a win after we beat them in the first game, but no matter! We face them again in two days (kindly forget about everything that’s happening in Vancouver and focus all your sports-related luck-wishing in my direction). And more importantly, in two or so weeks, we face the Tanzania group in what promises to be an extremely competitive School for Field Studies Rainy Season Olympics (they’ll be at the Kenya field site for one day with us before our group leaves for Tanzania, and that’s how we’ve decided to spend it). So all athletic competition before then is just practice for that showdown, and that’s when I’m really going to need your mental support. I’ll let you know how it goes.

We’ve done all kinds of other fun things recently . . . we went and played soccer with students at the local primary school (well, everyone else played soccer . . . I ended up playing lion-chases-gazelles with about 40 of the kids. I was the lion. Shrieking, laughing, and roaring are the same in every language!), and we also worked at a mobile health clinic in Loitokitok. I gave out dewormers and sat with a volunteer doctor while he diagnosed and wrote prescriptions for patients – his name is Joseph, and he lives in Obama’s grandparents’ village. When Obama visited Kenya as a senator, he came to that village to speak about corruption, and all the villagers (including Joseph) were skeptical of him because they knew him as the little mzungu who used to walk behind his grandmother to the market carrying a sack of vegetables . . . and now he is the Mzungu-In-Chief! Joseph also taught me some tricks for riling up the lions in Tsavo, which I may or may not be using. I was proud that we were able to help out the clinic at all . . . it’s a wonderful institution; it travels around to rural areas in Kenya and gives out free vitamins, dewormers, and other medication, tests children for malnourishment (and gives out food supplements if necessary), and keeps tabs on AIDS in the area. It was well-run and altogether inspiring, and I haven’t read up on political news in the US recently, but if DC is still stuck on the health care bill I think they should hang out in the mobile clinic for a day to get their senses of purpose rejuvenated.

As I mentioned earlier, on Saturday, we’re going to Tsavo National Park for expedition, which lasts five nights and involves camping and hiking and field lectures and campfires and all kinds of other stuff that, although my time here is way too short to wish away, means we’re all counting the days until we head out (only two more now). So this is my last blog for a bit, but I’ll have a bajillion stories when I get back, and possibly fewer limbs, but hopefully not.

p.s. thanks for the comments and e-mails everybody! it is nice to hear from you all.

p.p.s. I have a lot of good animal stories from our our trips to Amboseli, but I think I’m going to wait to post about them until I get to Tanzania and can also (hopefully) put up some pictures. But they are pretty cool, I promise.

2/19/10 - 2/20/10: PLAYING TOURIST/PLAYING NATIVE

The most interesting, and contradictory, pair of days I’ve had here took place a little over a week ago, when we had two immersion activities back to back. Last Friday, we went back to Amboseli National Park, this time with our tourist hats on – rather than driving around counting wildlife or having lectures, we had a short animal-watching game drive, visited a cultural manyatta (a small Maasai boma set up within the park where visitors can go to learn about the local culture), and ate lunch/hung out at one of the tourist lodges. The next day, Saturday, was our homestay - we were dropped off early in the morning at the real Maasai bomas near our camp (by ‘real’ I mean the not-for-tourists bomas . . . the cultural manyattas are real too, people live there. But it’s different, in ways I’ll try to explain) and spent the day going native. I’ve had very few pairs of adjacent days in my life that were as different from each other as those two. In order to give you some idea of what I mean, I’m going to write out a comparative schedule, going activity by activity. Here goes!

~7:00 AM, FRIDAY: Wake up. Get dressed – t-shirt, shorts, sandals, lots of sunscreen. Breakfast at camp. Pack what’s needed for the day – notebook, camera, binoculars, more sunscreen, a bathing suit, Kenyan shillings, water bottle, walking stick.

~7:00 AM, SATURDAY: Wake up. Get dressed – skirt, sandals, nice shirt (= less dirty, with buttons). Breakfast at camp. Pack what’s needed for the day – water bottle, walking stick, Swahili notes, camera, and a plastic bag containing a whole cabbage, two juiceboxes of milk, a bag of sugar, a package of saran-wrapped butter, a bag of Nice brand corn flour (®), and two packets of tea.

~8:00 AM, FRIDAY: Pile into land cruisers for the drive to Amboseli. Go through Kimana and then northwest. The closer we get to the park, the more animals we catch sight of through the trees (mostly giraffes and Thomsons gazelles (aka Tommies), with some zebras and one elephant way far off).

~8:00 AM, SATURDAY: Pile into land cruisers and drive through Kimana to neighboring bomas. See lots of cows, goats and sheep (aka shoats), dogs that would get their owners arrested in America (Maasai don’t take care of or name their dogs, I’m not really sure why they even have them. But when Daniel saw Ian’s joke “Wisconsin Cow-Tipping Club” t-shirt, he was horrified at the thought), and scores of waving and yelling kids (we wave and yell back, as always).

~8:45 AM, FRIDAY: Arrive at Amboseli gate. Take the roof hatches off the car so we can stand up and look through them. Get swarmed by mamas selling bracelets and statues. Coral is from Puerto Rico and is used to haggling in Spanish, but her skills do not translate and she got ripped off like crazy last time (it turns out most of the crafts sold by Maasai at the gate are made at the home village of Moses, one of our staff members, and that the middlemen jack the prices way up) and is looking for revenge*. She finds the mama (Mama Manuel!) and they have a hilarious trilingual argument. Mama Manuel ends up helping us push our land cruiser when Daniel has to jumpstart it through the gate later, Coral buys another bracelet, and all is forgiven on both sides.
*note: none of us really mind getting ripped off by the mamas, but you’d be surprised what you find to make fake complaint-jokes about when you can’t find anything actually wrong with your life.

~8:20 AM, FRIDAY: Dropped off at boma with my partner, Coral. Given a walkie-talkie in case of emergencies, and a jug of water. Introduced to Mama Konkai (our host), her mother Mama Koko, her daughter, and her granddaughter. We enter the boma, a dung-and-branch hut about tall enough for me to stand in, and are seated on the bed, which is made of cowhide stretched over a wooden frame. Mama Konkai and Mama Koko sit on the bed opposite. We sit in silence and realize that we have forgotten every bit of Swahili we’ve ever learned, and then we realize that it doesn’t matter because Mama Konkai and Mama Koko speak pretty much exclusively Maa, the Maasai dialect. “Hello” in Maa is “Supa!” and the response is “Ipa!” so we do that a few times.

~9:30, FRIDAY: We drive through the park to the cultural manyatta, a Maasai village set up for tourists. Today we are “playing tourist” and so pretend to not know very much about the Maasai. We’re greeted with a welcome dance/warrior jumping contest and a prayer and invited into the manyatta. It’s much bigger than the bomas we’ve seen, and full of men and women in traditional clothing.

~9:30, SATURDAY: Mama Konkai brings us outside into the livestock area, which is an acacia-fenced clearing in the middle of the boma, to milk one of her cows. She does the actual milking (into an honest-to-goodness calabash!) and we are assigned to take pictures. A baby goat fights with Mama Konkai over the milk. We all look at the pictures for a while and laugh. There are no men in the boma (we’ll later find out that our six guys, who did their homestay with the warriors, spent about an hour shucking corn and then the rest of the the day walking around, ostensibly herding goats but mostly just hanging out) but there are women of all ages milking cows and getting firewood from the trees outside the boma fence. Maasai fashion is a really interesting mix of their more traditional skirts and wraps and jewelry and brand- and event-name American-looking t-shirts and hats (a lot of the little kids wear matching jeans and jean jackets, it seems to be a trend) and it’s all very colorful and cool-looking.

~10:00, FRIDAY: Our manyatta guide gives us a lecture on Maasai culture and then we watch them make a fire by rubbing together a hardowod stick and a piece of softer wood over dried cow dung. It doesn’t work very well, but eventually it catches. Later we’re shown into one of the huts, where a half-used book of matches is laid out next to the fire and a Nike hat is on a shelf next to the window.

~10:00, SATURDAY: We make chai! We light a fire (with matches), boil the milk over it, and add sugar and tea from the bag we brought. We mess up about a million times but eventually form a fairly good hand gesture system with Mama Konkai. We say “pole sana” (“very sorry”) and “asante” (“thank you”) a lot. We discover that singing the few Swahili phrases we know is very hilarious to everybody, so we start doing it, and they do it back, and just like that we’ve got another (albeit limited) form of communication!

~10:30, FRIDAY: We’re brought out to a giant clearing where we are encouraged to buy things from the mamas. We are all a little depressed by the manyatta for various reasons. Amanda and I talk about how it probably seems to the Maasai like we’re acting skittish because we think their culture is strange, but really we’re acting skittish because we feel bad about paying a fee to be invited into their homes and intrude on their lives (especially when we’ve been actually invited to bomas many times before and it’s felt much better and two-sided and more relaxed), and we’re weirded out that the manyatta workers feel like they have to hide the aspects of ‘Western’/’modern’ culture that they’ve incorporated into their own.

~10:30, SATURDAY: We finish the chai, which is about 30000 degrees (Celsius) and Mama Konkai leads us outside again, this time to help reinforce the roof of the hut. The roof is made of a grid of sticks tied together with plant fibers; we are in charge of filling in any gappy areas with more sticks. Coral asks what the plant fiber is made of and I am able to tell from how it smells that it is made of maize leaves (thank you, summer at the Sunshine Farm cornstand!). We get pretty good at it and Mama Konkai walks by several times singing encouragingly.

12:00, FRIDAY: Lunchtime! We have been getting keyed up for days about eating at Amboseli’s Serena Lodge. You’d think we’d gone years rather than weeks without eating American food, but we are by far the most excitable group of people (bar maybe a European soccer team) I have ever been a part of or come across or sighted from afar, and when we have an excuse to froth over something, we are unstoppable. I wish I could describe the buffet and the things uttered through mouths full of it as it was consumed (we were upon it as locusts upon the wheat of Egypt, for real) but it wouldn’t make sense because on its own it really was just your average uppity hotel buffet with a surprising amount of curry-related food and some really cool African fruit (passion fruits are so awesome).

12:00, SATURDAY: Lunchtime! We are slightly better at making lunch than we are at making chai. Lunch is butter and cabbage (from our bag) cooked with tomatoes and onions (presumably from someone’s farm; a neighbor brought them over earlier) and a great big pot of ugali. Ugali’s the staple starch here, the equivalent of rice in Asia or spaghetti at 32 Mill Street. It’s made of corn flour boiled with water until it forms a bright white grainy sort of paste, and it doesn’t taste like much on its own but it’s quite good with vegetables over it (for example, cabbage, another staple food . . . Zu 2010, get yourselves ready for ugali and cabbage. U-G-A-L-I, YOU AIN’T GOT NO ALIBI). We ate with Konkai and Koko, and then Konkai’s daughter came in to take the leftovers to the men, wherever the heck they were while we were slaving over the roof.

1:00 FRIDAY: The rest of the day is dedicated to touristing it up. We go swimming, hang out by the pool laughing at/photographing/provoking the vervet monkeys (Amboseli’s fearless-city-pigeon equivalent), talking to the staff (everyone wants to know where I got my walking stick, and to make sure that I know it’s for an old man . . . as well as being the overall most awesome thing I have ever purchased, it’s probably the best conversation starter in the country).

1:00 SATURDAY: The rest of the day is spent alternating between work and resting/drinking gallons of chai. We were brought to a small pond to get water – Maasai women carry heavy things using straps that then go across their foreheads, but I somehow missed this piece of information, because when Mama Konkai tried to give me my container of water to carry, I offered my shoulder and my neck, which was pretty hilarious to the kids washing clothes nearby (apparently I was even funnier when actually carrying the water). The freight strategy makes sense . . . they have to walk very far, and this puts the weight on the back rather than more fragile and easily tired parts of the body. Later we carried firewood this way, too . . . first, Mama Konkai and her daughter chopped it off of acacia trees using a machete (Konkai’s daughter was holding her baby on her back while she did this . . . you have to really trust yourself in order to raise a baby on the African savannah and I guess this was just a manifestation of that). We rested for a while after the heavy lifting . . . the mamas sat on one bed and probably talked about how weird we were, and Coral and I sat on the other and talked about how the mamas were probably talking about how weird we were (it was not really awkward at all, though. They were very gracious hosts, and we tried really hard, and we spent a lot of the day all laughing together). In the afternoon, when it got cooler, we got to reinforce the cow dung walls using (yup) fresh cow dung. It’s interesting, you look at a pile of cow poop and you think “I don’t want to touch that” and then you think “you know, I am going to have to touch that sooner or later, so I am just going to do it now” and then you stick your hands in it and just tell yourself that it’s really really good soil. After we washed our hands, we cleaned out the hut . . . well, actually, Coral swept out the hut and I got distracted by the kids who kept peeking in at us through the air holes in the hut’s walls and went outside and played Lion Chases Gazelles with them (I was generally the lion). There were about 25 kids in the boma and soon they were all in on it, but then I started feeling bad for Coral and went back inside. But in the meantime, something had happened that possibly changed mzungu/Maasai relations in Kimana for all time . . . the mamas had somehow discovered that Coral can dance. She dances kind of constantly (because she is a CRAZYPERSON! Hello Coral, in the future, when we all get nostalgic for Kenya and read each others’ blogs) and is indeed very good at it and one round of joke-singing with the mamas had just been too much and she’d started busting moves, and the mamas were very impressed. Before I knew it, everyone in the whole boma was packed into our hut, singing traditional songs and the two popular songs we all knew (‘Jambo Bwana’, used to welcome tourists pretty much everywhere in Kenya and written by a band called Them Mushrooms, and an abridged version of Hakuna Matata) over and over while Coral danced and I drummed on my knees so as not to feel too useless. Every time a song ended, someone else would start a new one up. We did this for at least an hour and a half until Suzzane came to pick us up. It’s very safe to say that if any other Maasai celebrations happen while we’re here, we (or at least Coral) will certainly be invited.

So yes, those were my two days – each representative of a certain kind of distilled Kenyan exprience and both very very different from each other. I think in the end I would rather go back to the boma for a day than to Serena (especally if I could bring Coral). And it’s funny, when you know how someone leads her daily life, you’re slightly less likely to blame her for aggressively trying to sell you bracelets at the Amboseli gates.

usiku mzuri wote!

Carabash