4/1/10: NATURE PLAYS TRICKS

Long time no see again! "A couple of hours" Tanzania time is pretty much infinite, it seems like. But here it is: the blog you've been waiting for, maybe!

The next day was special for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it was Sarah’s birthday. Sarah is our Student Affairs Manager, or S.A.M. She has lived in East Africa for four years now – she did the SFS program and got hooked, and after she finished school she went back to Kenya and worked in an orphanage before she got this job. Next year she is going back to the US for graduate school, so this was potentially her last game drive for a long time. Thus, she requested that we dress up as either our favorite animals, or as fanimals (fans of particular animals). She complied with her own request:

as did a few other people who wore zebra-patterned spandex pants. But Christine made two pairs of paper cheetah ears, and we drew on each others’ faces with eyeliners, and I think we may have won:

(Oh, hey Christine. Picture that, but with hair, and it’s pretty much what I looked like, probably). So we went into the crater like that. It had the unexpected result of keeping the hawkers away, because when they cried out “hey, mzungu! necklace, 5000!” it was possible to say “hapana mzungu. duma” (not mzungu, cheetah) and they had no reply. Also, a lot of tourists meowed at us.

The road down to the crater was one part roller coaster and two parts postcard and necessitated (as so many things here do) an a capella rendition of the Jurassic Park theme song:

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and the first thing we saw upon arriving safely at the bottom was this goofy-looking secretary bird, balancing himself somehow on a tree.

Soon after we came upon this scene, which I like to call “The Wildebeest Snubs The Weaver”

but it turned out that all of this was a prelude to one of the happiest fifteen-minute sections of my life. Our driver, Dr. Kissui, is our Wildlife Management professor and a lion expert, so he keeps his eyes out for small tawny ears above the grassline. He saw some, and we pulled over and were greeted by these two cheetah brothers:

And then Christine and I summoned them with our minds and they came closer:

And closer, until they were right here!

And we left them sleeping in the grass and dreaming of juicy wildebeests.

Before we even stopped for lunch, we also encountered this extremely stately hartebeest

SMILE

he wouldn’t smile.
Luckily, these flamingos were being more social (at least with each other):

Quite a different sort of social interaction was going on between some lions when we accidentally walked (drove?) in on them at an inopportune, PG-13 rated moment. I’m not sure whether it was our fault, but the whole situation dissolved soap opera-quickly – by the time we left, if feline facial expressions and body language are to be trusted, we’d run the gamut of lion emotions, from come-hither gestures:

to slightly angry pillow talk:

We left the lions to their mild domestic dispute and headed to our classroom for the day, a picnic spot near a pond full of noisy hippos and a very climbable tree. Visitors like to eat near the hippos, and black kites like to eat near the visitors, and sometimes, for example in the case of our intern Erica, black kites like to try to eat the visitors themselves (one slashed a carrot directly out of her hand and left her bleeding). I can neither confirm nor deny certain rumors that after witnessing that incident, Christine and I attempted some hawkbaiting. But if it happened, it was not too successful, and we had to settle for this kind of bottom-of-a-snowglobe kind of picture:

After teasing the hawks, we gathered on the hill for a lecture about what makes Ngorongoro special (it’s the only national park that really counts people as a protected species – Maasai graze their livestock in the crater). In the meantime, we found some critters who were hard at (their own, unusual kind of) work:

After the lecture, we strapped ourselves in and went back up the roller coaster and to camp. And what more can I say after all that?

So those were all of nature’s April Fool’s day tricks, which we fell for completely and never want to be disabused of. We humans aren’t quite as good at that kind of thing, but we did our level best. Dr. Wallis, our Wildlife Ecology professor, started the morning off right by trying to convince us that her motion-detector camera trap had snapped pictures of something weird and lionlike overnight. Amanda, Christine, Becca and Ryan turned Sarah’s office literally upside-down. Chelsea and I had been planning to sandwich-face (sandwich-facing: smushing a slice of peanut-buttered bread on either side of someone’s face) Mambo since he threatened to do it to us in Serengeti, and we managed it that night while everyone was doing homework, and he finally let his guard and his hood down for long enough for us to get him. Then he and Ryan retaliated by doing the same thing to me, but they upped the condiment to a peanut butter and mud mixture, so it was basically just like getting a free exfoliate treatment inside a Reese’s cup. Then they threw bread into our tent but Chelsea guarded it valiantly. As a recipient of half of Mike Giaimo’s genes, I am required to consider April Fool’s Day halfway endless, and half of endlessness is still endless, so no one should be surprised to hear that there is something epic in the works. But I can’t say any more until it is actually implemented.

So far, though, the winning prank is The Epic Salt Switch (prankster: Christine; prankee: Ian). Let’s just say that salt and powdered laundry detergent look very similar, but taste a lot different on hard-boiled eggs.

(BONUS TRACK! This is what the inside of a cruiser (specifically KBB) looks like during lunch (back row left -> right: Aubrey, Christine, and Amanda; front row left->right: Sam, Ian):)

I hope you enjoyed your virtual journey! I had a pretty great time reliving it. Soon I will be writing for Glimpse.org, so I have a feeling that blog will get slightly more attention than this one. But if you have time, you can . . . read . . . both!

kwaheri sana, kaka duma.

kwaheri sana everyohne else too!

3/30/10 – 3/31/10 A COUPLE OF GOOD DAYS

Well! Still in Tanzania. Still owe this blog a lot of stories, namely about Tsavo and the site switch and the five days we spent in Serengeti National Park (if this were a teaser trailer, you would now see the following images in quick succession: a discouraging lack of wildebeests, a rock hyrax in a tree, some hippos kissing, Christine and Amanda singing the Jurassic Park theme song for an appreciative lodgeowner, a cheetah killing an impala, and an askari named Bura hitting a hyena in the head with my walking stick. COMING SOON). But these past three days in Tanzania have been pretty representative and awesome, and they say good things come in threes, so I can probably count on tomorrow not being quite as worthy of descriptive attention. Before these memories fade, then, time to press ‘em down!

Something the professors here like to do (and something I wish Amherst college professors would do more, though I don’t know how feasible it is) is give traveling lectures – we all get into the cruisers and drive from relevant spot to relevant spot, and in each one we get to hear a little bit about why exactly that spot is relevant. On Tuesday, we had a four-hour one of those, which started out on the top of a hill and about the ecology of the Tarangire-Manyara ecosystem, and ended up in a curio shop and about tanzanite mining. One great/not so great thing about traveling lectures is that the scenery provides plenty of distraction if you’re up for it. When we were on the hill, the meteorology was enough – the clouds our heads were in boiled around and changed colors and rained on us and then dissipated and left the sky a kind of Barbicide-blue and we all got sunburnt before we knew the sun had even shown up. And then I happened to turn around and see this Maasai boy herding his goats on a hilltop level with ours.

Needless to say, I’m hoping the Tanzanian ecosystem can be studied experientially. At our next stop, next to a road, we learned about beekeeping and I watched bicyclists go by with their handlebars completely hung with little fish they were taking to sell in nearby Karatu. Okello, our Center Director and former professor who still teaches when he gets the opportunity, made a guest appearance to talk about ecotourism. He was smart and kept us in the cruisers for his lecture, which he delivered from the hood of one (from the left: Okello, Clinton, Coral, Chelsea, Sam, and Kaila).

For our last stop, they loosed us on a curio shop complex, where shopkeepers tried to sell us tanzanite (way too expensive, even at “student prices”) and lion teeth (way too cheap, since that’s illegal). Christine and I contemplated buying black t-shirts with cheetahs screenprinted on them and the bottom and sleeve edges frayed and braided with Kenyan-colored beads, but by the time we’d worked out the mental justification necessary it was time for our last lecture, and then we headed back to camp.

After thinking hard about landscapes and people in the morning, in the afternoon we went to Lake Manyara National Park to look mindlessly at animals. Actually, come to think of it, we were there to do a field exercise that involved counting baboons. So we must have done that at some point (oh, I kid, I kid, of course I remember). We drove into the clearing near the lake and were greeted by all kinds of garden-variety large African mammals – giraffes, zebra, Cape buffalo, and the rest of the exotic-locale epitomizers, by now pretty familiar to us, if you can believe it. But we were looking for baboon troops to census! And that day, the baboons felt like hanging out and grazing near the edge of the clearing, among some impala, including this male (who, in a stunning display of actually being scary despite generally appearing cute, bleated loudly in a way you would not expect an impala to bleat and sent most of the females in his harem running. The baboons were not bothered).

The baboons also didn’t mind the presence of these overaggressive warthogs (I know it looks like dancing, but they were fighting! I hope they both made it).

Next we stopped briefly at the swamp to look at all the cool shorebirds and check off some more in our bird books (my first spoonbill! Tori, we’ve come a long way since putting spoons in our mouth and flapping our arms at home).

After that, we happened to drive by just as a couple of elephants got particularly itchy and couldn’t take it anymore. We have studied elephant vegetation damage before, so it was particularly eye-opening to see how it actually happens:

When that elephant’s sides and legs were satisfied, he joined a friend in piggybacking a fallen tree and getting in a nice belly scratch. This was a large tree, but under two elephants-worth of force it shook like a sapling. Seeing these individuals take on a small part of the forest, and multiplying the effect by the number of elephants that tend to roam around together in large herds, it was easy to see how elephants have single-hoofedly changed much of Amboseli’s habitat type from woodland to grassland.

Next, we ran into some babies, including a small elephant who was learning how to be destructive:

And some young zebras who were learning how to have mohawks:

And there were some dikdiks:

who were probably full grown but who always look like small aliens:

Lake Manyara is a very small park compared to the ones we’d visited before, and it was cool to feel as though we’d been able to see so much of it in one visit. The groundwater forest also houses animals that aren’t found very many other places, like the blue colobus monkey, who is much shyer than the baboon. I still have to go back, though – we missed the hot springs, and the lake itself, because baboons don’t tend to hang out there. But according to the brochure, “the lake forms the most spectacular sight”, and apparently when the water is sufficiently high, you can go canoeing among the flamingos. I also missed the infamous tree-climbing lions, although one group did get to see them. And I guess you don’t really need an excuse to revisit a Man and Biosphere Reserve.

Having done a lot of shushing each other and silently pointing, we were glad, on the next day, to be given an Environmental Policy field exercise that involved talking to people. Ji-Yeon, Chelsea, Alex Hughes, Kaila and I set out together into an Iraqu village (Iraqu = a Tanzanian tribe – now that we’re here, we are no longer working only with Maasai) near Karatu-Town (the largest town in the area). We had a translator, but I practiced my Swahili anyway. A few of that day’s commonly used phrases:

“Mbuzi mdogo sana sana sana sana [infinite sanas]” = “very very very very [etc.] small goat”. This was appropriate because the first house we went to had a fuzzy just-born white goat about as big as a small cat and I had to restrain myself from kidnapping it and putting it in my backpack. The second house had a speckled goat and I had to hold Chelsea back from doing the same thing – she decided right then and there to raise goats and become an artisan cheesemaker.

“Mbwa mkubwa sana sana sana sana [infinite sanas]” = “very very very very [etc.] large dog”. The dogs in Tanzania are much more protective of their human and livestock friends than the goats in Kenya were, perhaps because they’re treated better.

“Ninasema Kiswahili kidogo sana sana sana [you get it]” = “I speak very [etc.] little Swahili”. This usually elicited laughter, which is understandable. Oh well. At least I wasn’t in Olivia’s group . . . an older woman told them that she often eats giraffe meat that she’s given by the government (senility is present in every culture! It just displays itself differently, I guess. Although apparently giraffe is delicious).

We went through thorns and sunflowers and from farm to farm asking people about human-wildlife conflict in the area, and got some surprising answers (surprising to us, anyway, but I’ll spare you). As always, we also met very interesting people, including a couple who stopped hoeing their maize to talk to us, and got into an endearingly flirtatious shoving match when the man said he couldn’t stand wildlife and the woman disagreed. There was one woman who politely declined to be interviewed because she was on the way to the clinic in Karatu-town. She looked healthy but then we noticed that the baby on her back had a fully developed sixth finger which was hanging off of her pinky by a tiny thread of skin. We stopped by an evidentally wealthier part of the village, where the houses were much larger and more well-constructed, several houses had cars or rustless bicycles outside, and none of the dogs’ ribs were visible. It was probably not coincidental that the people we interviewed in this part of town cited no conflicts with wildlife at all. One family invited us inside, where they had enough stools for all nine of us, and the walls were decorated with torn-out magazine articles about Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, and a gigantic poster of fruit, the size and faded bluish color of the kind you see on the sides of mobile Italian Ice stands.

On the way back, we passed a farmstead we’d been in before, and the man we had interviewed smiled broadly and called something out to our translator. It turned out that he was a witch doctor and that his wife was predicting the rains, and he was wondering if we wanted to come watch. This trip, especially our cultural manyatta experiences, has made me a little suspicious of things like that, but of course we weren’t about to miss out, and we gathered around as the witch doctor lady tossed river pebbles on the ground and gathered them up again. It was very fast and reminded me of nothing so much as bananagrams. We didn’t get to find out when it was going to rain next, because the man who had called us over spotted my walking stick, and of course it sparked something, because that’s what it’s good at. This time, the man decided that if I had one stick, of course I would want more (this is a common thought process around here, for some reason) and he brought out his witch doctor stick, a lighter version of mine with a freaky-looking oval head carved into it. I did not want it! but Alex Hughes decided that he did. So he is now 5000 Tanzanian shillings poorer (about $3.75) and is set to go all voodoo on us any day now. A little research reveals that Tanzanian witch doctors do exist, but all it really tells me is that they got in the news recently for killing albinos in order to use their body parts for amulets. There has been a government crackdown, and hopefully they don’t do that anymore.

So back through the sunflowers we went (that’s Ji-Yeon)

and to camp

where I think we had a quiz, and then played some checkers (that’s our kitten, Kili Monster . . . Monster for short)

and got excited for the next day’s game drive in Ngorongoro Crater. And rightly so, it turned out. More on that in a few hours, when the photos are finally loaded!

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

2/9/10-2/14/10: A FEW TYPICAL(?) DAYS 'OFF'

Niaje! Sawa sawa? Sawa sawa.

Last time I managed to pull a post together, I told you about a typical school day here at Kimana Base Camp. Many of the days that have passed since that particular day have also passed in that particular way, give or take a few epic volleyball plays (I’m not sure how the volleyball itself is hanging in there, but it has somehow not yet suffered a thorny death. However, we have lost many players, may they rest in peace . . . just kidding, just kidding. only some limbs) and even more epic breakfast crews – Mambo and I were on pancake duty again the other day and surprised everybody by breaking out my secret stash of chocolate chips (thanks Mom!). As a result, we were elected temporary copresidents of KBC and earned ourselves several weeks’ supply of backrub IOUs (KBC’s economy is barter-based; staple goods include backrubs, half-hour chunks of internet time, AirTime calling cards, dishwashing-related favors, and sodas from the duka).

Fairly often, though, we do get days off, or we have special classes or exercises that take place outside the camp, and we get to drive through the gates to various places and have adventures and get terrifically sunburnt. So here are some examples of the things we’ve gotten to do on those days!

1. 2/9/10: WATERFALL HIKE, LOITOKITOK, AND CLUB KIMANA
On our first non-program day, which seems like forever ago by now, we drove in the land cruisers waaaay South to a town called Loitokitok, which is bigger and a little more stratified than Kimana (think Northampton vs. Amherst). I happened to be in a cruiser with a lot of people who were very excited about our first day off, and who tend to ‘express themselves vocally’, so we spent much of the car ride singing. Our driver, Suzzane, cranked down the windows and encouraged us whenever we drove through a populated area, her rationale, which we adopted, being “everybody is staring at you anyway because you are mzungus, so you might as well give them some reason to”. She cranked the windows back up when we started singing Mambo #5, though – apparently it was banned in Kenya, probably for excessive lasciviousness, or maybe excessive trumpet. We picked up some armed guards in Loitokitok, then kept driving until we got to the edge of a valley much nearer to Kilimanjaro than we’d been before. Down in the valley was a maize field, and through the maize field was a small trail, and at the end of the small trail was a river and a waterfall! And in the river there were lots of parasites so we couldn’t go swimming. But we spent the rest of the morning climbing on the boulders and the vines, taking risks, taking pictures of each other taking risks, and having a picnic. My friend Amanda, who’s from Western Massachusetts and goes to school at Williams, comisserated with me about how until you noticed the vines and the strange bugs and how hot it was, it was easy to imagine that we’d somehow stumbled back into New England.

After that, we headed back to Loitokitok for a few hours, mostly so that three of us – Christine, Kayt, and Caity – could follow through with an idea they’d had earlier in the week. It’s very hot here, and the showers are cold, and we’re all hoping to take risks and to learn more about ourselves while we’re here, and due to all of those things, and the practical and spiritual considerations that arise from them, the three of them decided to shave their heads. Although none of the rest of us were brave enough to actually do it, we all had to tag along, and so, like scavenging vultures wheeling above a kill site, we followed our three lion leaders into Man Mix Salon and watched them get de-maned. Notable parts of the procedure: a. if you get your head shaved, and they do it a few inches at a time, you get to see how you’d look with all kinds of different hairstyles. b. there is a (very well-advertised) hairstyle called “The Beyonce”. c. barbers in Kenya use a cow tail to brush the snips off of your shoulders. d. if you’ve had hair for a long time and you get it amputated, you get phantom hair syndrome.

(TO MAKE THINGS PERFECTLY CLEAR: i did not shave my head. not even one tiny bit. I am getting all of this information from my friends who did. I need my hair here, for purposes related to camouflage)

After hanging around Loitokitok for a while longer and playing hackeysack with some salesmen, we piled back into the cars, mostly too tired and shellshocked to sing at this point, and made our way to Club Kimana, Kimana District’s premier social hangout. The proprietor is a former chief of Kimana, and apparently he likes to regale students with stories of Kenyan political intrigue, so I’m looking forward to that for future visits. This time, though, he just greeted us all very warmly, sat us at a few tables (round, outdoors, and with Kilimanjaro watching, as always, to make sure we didn’t get too rowdy) and made himself scarce (until it looked like we needed something, at which point he was always right there, somehow). And the drinking age is 18 here, so we students took the opportunity to get to know things about each other that we might not necessarily have otherwise thought to mention.

Eventually we headed back and had our regular end-of-day routine and I figured my ‘weekend’ was pretty much over, which would have been fine, I’d enjoyed it. But of course it was not, because the African wilderness always has something more in store! This time it was a ghost-headlamp and a couple of bushbabies. What happened was this: Mambo and I were hanging out alone in the chumba (because I’m still always the last one awake) when we heard a terrible shriek coming from one of the bandas. We sprang into action, which in this case involved Mambo running halfway down the path towards the sound, realizing he didn’t have a flashlight, yelling at me to bring him a flashlight, and then me catching up with him with the flashlight and us both making it to the banda within a minute and still somehow being several months behind four askaris, who had already assessed the situation and were checking the banda and weren’t even breathing hard (I’ve felt pretty safe here since that night). We figured out that it was nothing (a particularly scary nothing involving doors and wind and coincidences, but still a nothing) but Christine and Lauren were still scared, so Mambo and I agreed to hang out on their banda steps and talk while they tried to go to sleep inside.

We were stargazing and shooting the (nonexistent) breeze and just starting to think that the people we were making feel better were probably starting to no longer need us when we heard ANOTHER shrieking, this one more animalish. So Mambo and I again went running toward the sound, again had to retrace our steps for the flashlight (but this time, when I made it back to the steps, Christine, who was NOT sleeping, jumped on my back because she wanted to tag along but wasn’t wearing shoes), and managed to find the source of the sound – a couple of bushbabies wrestling in the grass a couple bandas down from where we’d been sitting. They didn’t care that we were there at all, and we were able to watch them yelp and jump on each other and scramble around for a good four or five minutes (in the meantime, we scared Sam to death, because she heard the sound and looked out her window to see a horrible silhouetted two-headed hybrid creature, which was of course me piggybacking Christine, but she didn’t know that until after she’d already had a small heart attack). And after that of course we couldn’t go to sleep, so we stayed up talking for most of the night and then when I finally did return to my banda, someone had locked me out, so I went back to Christine and Lauren’s and slept on the empty bed in my clothes. A different kind of roughing it than what I’d expected, but it works for me. And I think that still ranks as among my best nights here so far.

2. 2/13/10 – KIMANA WATER PROJECT AND MAASAI CIRCUMCISION CEREMONY
After our day off, we had several pretty rigorous days of classes, so we were all excited for that Saturday, which had been slotted for community service in the afternoon. And we were even more excited when we learned on Thursday night that we were actually cancelling morning classes and moving community service forward a few hours. Why would your professors do that when we are paying good money for tuition, you ask? Because we got invited to a party! And if that doesn’t seem like a good enough excuse to you, you obviously don’t remember your college years very well at all.

In all seriousness, it was a great honor to be invited to this party – one of our neighbors sons was getting circumcised, which is a very important event in a Maasai’s life, because it marks his entrance into the warrior age class. It’s kind of the equivalent of a bar or bat mitzvah, or a cotillian. The boy, who’s usually in his early teens, gets circumcised in the morning after taking a cold shower to cleanse him of past misdeeds. He then has his hair washed with milk and shaves it off. When he’s actually circumcised, he isn’t allowed to cry. If he manages to make it through without showing fear, he’s passed the test. In that case, his family throws a big party, and news spreads about it through word of mouth, so everyone within gossip’s reach tends to show up. The last time an SFS group got to attend any kind of real Maasai celebration was 2003, so this was an amazing opportunity.

When we got to the boma, we shook the mamas’ hands and they danced for us/with us again. Then, just like at any American barbecue, it was time to chill out until the rest of the guests arrived. The Maasai patio was a large clearing with a tree in the middle of it, right outside the boma. We were led over there and given chai tea, and Daniel explained some of what was going on around us. In the meantime, most of the people were staring at us, which tends to happen here . . . Kimana’s not a big tourist hotspot, so any foreigners are a source of great interest. It’s not so bad, though, because it gives us an excuse to stare back, and the staring usually leads to some kind of conversation, and then everyone learns something.

Eventually we were brought into another clearing and given some roasted goat meat! Again, just like a barbecue (seriously, one thing that’s been so interesting about being here is how similar everything is all over the world if you let yourself think about it that way. A Maasai party itinerary would look a lot like an American one if you abstracted things enough). I’ve been breaking my vegetarianism here whenever not doing so would mean missing out on an experience such as, say, eating roasted goat meat at a Maasai circumcision ceremony. The taste took a little getting used to, and I had to chew my small piece for about 10 minutes, but it actually got better as the time went on (Molly was saying that she didn’t used to like it but now she does, to the extent that she really looks forward to when the askaris have goat roasts. . . . I’ll keep you posted).

After that, dancing! This part is very difficult to explain without pictures, but . . . well, I took pictures, so that’s good. Until I can get them to a viewable place, I’ll just do my best. Traditionally, a Maasai warrior’s job was to go on cattle raids in neighboring villages. Now, of course, that’s illegal, so most of the warriors spend all their time looking for parties like the one we were at. If they hear there’s a party, they’ll walk all day to get there, and stay there all night dancing and drinking and chasing local girls. They also grow their hair out long and are very attached to it, and when the warriors get too old to be warriors anymore and have to settle down and get married and start having kids and making a living (traditionally through pastoralism, these days more through agriculture or a combination of the two), they become senior warriors through a ritual that involves shaving their heads (apparently they usually cry . . . leave it to the Maasai to acknowledge the midlife crisis/get people over it all in one ceremonial blow). Daniel told us to look out for people who seemed sad and newly shorn, and there were definitely some men who were noticeably both of those things.

Anyway, what I was leading to with that explanation was this: Maasai warriors are basically rock stars, or wannabe rock stars. And when they started dancing and singing, it was very easy to pretend that we were at a Maasai rock concert. It was like a big mosh pit with walking sticks poking out among the heads, and they were trading off chanting and singing (Daniel translated a little and the songs were about how they belong to the most awesome age set, how they’ve killed many lions, and how they’re great singers and dancers . . . again, standard rock and roll) just like I read about for my improvised music paper this fall, so it was very cool to hear that in real life. Eventually, the song turned into a jumping showdown, and it was unbelievable. One of our askaris was by far the best and I felt a lot of hometown pride. Then everyone regrouped into a circle, including the women and the older men and little kids (who had been practicing their jumping on the outside of the circle), and us, and started into a chant with a tricky rhythm that we eventually managed to figure out. I got dragged into things by a mama who was a little tipsy and decided that she wanted to steal my walking stick . . . rather than give it up I held on and ended up in the mosh pit, and I was happy to be there – standing among the people, it was easier to hear what everyone was singing, and each person had a slightly different part but they all melded together so well and it was easily up there with any real rock concert I’ve been to. I would have stayed there all day if the mlevi mama hadn’t made another more concerted effort at my stick and I had to escape.

After the dancing, we thanked the family of the boy who the party was for (the boy himself was still inside, recovering – the mamas kept dancing around the house he was in so that he would know everyone was happy for him) and gave them a small gift. I was feeling pretty sick at this point (foreshadowing!) so I kept to the edges of the group and managed to attract the attentions of a boy who was probably about fourteen. He spoke very good English and told me that his grandfather wanted to meet me. His grandfather did not speak as good English, but he offered me more chai and we traded greetings. The boy could tell I was only pretending to drink the chai (it was scalding) and he called me out on it as I came back over, so I defended myself as best I could and we both laughed. Then my friend/fellow student Ryan came over. He assumed that if he talked in English I’d be the only one who could understand him (usually a fair assumption, but not always, especially with school-age kids) and the following conversation happened:

Ryan: “Man, I wish I had brought some bubbles with me. I’ve heard the kids really like bubbles.”
Boy whose name I never learned: “I don’t like bubbles.”
Ryan: “But I’m glad they like having their pictures taken so much, at least we can do that with them.”
Boy: “I don’t like pictures.”
Me: “What do you like?”
Boy: “I like you.”
at this point he blushed furiously and winked at me.

Sadly, I was rushed away with the group and never even got his name, let alone his number. And so ended my Maasai party, the same way most movie-perfect American parties end – with a missed connection.

Oh right! I forgot about the whole community service part of the day! Ok so in the morning, we worked for the Kimana Water Project, which is a community-run organization that is trying to bring water to the drier parts of Kimana so that people don’t have to walk miles every day for it (here’s where my instinct is to say “you can visit their website to learn more” but I’m thinking that would be a bit of a goose chase). My group dug a trench and mixed and poured cement in order to help build one of the main culverts . . . we worked for about three hours and by the end we’d only extended the culvert about ten meters. It’s amazing how much harder everything is when you only have a couple of shovels and wheelbarrows and your cement is made out of water and pulverized gravel. But every day the pipeline reaches a few more people, and there doesn’t seem to be any shortage of people who want to help with it. A lot of people had their livestock grazing nearby while they were working on the culvert, and some of the women just stopped by for half an hour or so while they happened to be getting water anyway. Nothing at all like construction sites back home.

So after that long day I actually got heat exhaustion! Apparently well chai-drated does not equal well hydrated (haaaa ha ha ha ha). But I am fine now, and glad to have gotten my obligatory “sick in a remote area of a foreign country” story out of the way (I hope).

3. 2/14/10 GIRAFFES! GIRAFFES!
The day after that was another non-program day, so I spent most of it recovering and finally getting some homework done. But in the middle of it I decided to buck up and go outside the camp gate with some classmates for a giraffe walk and I am really quite glad that I did. We don’t get to walk outside of the camp much, because there literally are elephants and lions everywhere, so by the time we’d gotten half a mile or so away, I was in completely unfamiliar territory. It’s mostly scrubland with little twisted trees, unusually green for this time of year, and littered with chunks of red volcanic rock and the occasional rocky outcropping (which, when spotted, always necessitates the spotter yelling “PRIDE ROCK!”). Perfect giraffe territory, luckily for us. Giraffes are browsers and eat leaves off those little trees, and they’re more comfortable in wooded areas than grassy ones, because lions and hyenas have fewer places to hide. Sure enough, after we’d ducked under the Kimana ‘electric’ fence (constructed by the government, without local input, several years ago to try to combat human-wildlife conflict in the area, and then given over to the locals to ‘take care of’ without any instructions as to how to do that, or funding to make it happen. So it’s been defunct for a while now . . . elephants knock over the pillars and waltz destructively right on in) and walked for a few more minutes, giraffes were suddenly everywhere, along with zebras and Thomson’s gazelles. The gazelles and zebras were a little skittish, but the giraffes seemed more curious than anything, particularly one very large male with a crooked horn. He let us get about 3 buslengths away from him before walking slowly and carefully away.

It’s hard to describe how strange it is to see a giraffe and be standing on the same ground as it. All the physical principals that allow you to move – muscle/bone leverage and ball-and-socket joints and gravity and friction and all those – are also powering this giraffe, but this giraffe is like a Caterpillar crane and you are like a bumper car. He has to squint to see you, and his head blocks out your sun. And you can stomp on the ground as hard as you want to and he won’t feel a thing, but if he starts running, little earthquakes happen all around you. He’s standing there and could kill you, but he doesn’t, and meanwhile, you’re helping kill him just by living the way you do. I’m possibly overthinking this, but that’s my job these days.
We reluctantly left the giraffes to their lunch and headed back to camp, where we did more homework until it was time for dinner. And then we had a campfire, and Alex (a fellow student who’s worked at Yosemite National Park for the past couple summers) and Daniel traded scary animal stories while we all listened. They both promised that they saved their best ones for Tsavo, when we’ll be camping out for a week in the middle of lion country in tents that Daniel described as being about the thickness of candy wrappers. Which just seems a little too convenient . . .

Thanks again for reading! I’ve managed to build up a surplus of cool things that have happened over the past week or so (that tends to happen here) so if you want to come back you’ll be hearing about Amboseli National Park, and about my yesterday, which I spent shadowing a family in a Maasai boma.

Salama!
Cara