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
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