We spent a night with the Maasai at the start of the week. They live in a village called a boma enclosed by a fence made of thorn bushes. The boma is circular with huts around the outside and pens in the middle for goats and cattle. There were two extended families living in our boma. The huts are made of stick frames smeared with cow or elephant dung. All the cooking is done inside the huts and there are only three windows that are about the size of a CD to let the smoke out.
I arrived at the homestay with another student and a translator named Johnson. Johnson told us the fly problem was due to the milk they keep around the village, but the fly problem was unbelievable. If you sat in one place for more than 10 seconds you would have at least 30 flies crawling on you. The Maasai were used to the flies so they would just let them crawl, and the laughed a lot when my friend and I spent all of our time swatting at flies.
In the late afternoon the goats and cows come home from grazing. They keep the goat mothers separated from their goat children all day, so when they come together it can only be described as a suckling frenzy. They saw each other across a field, starting bleating loudly, and charged full speed at each other. My friend got caught in the stampede but wasn't injured. Just after that happened a Maasai man stumbled up to us and started talking to us in a language we didn't understand. I could smell the alcohol on his breath from 5 feet away. Johnson told us he was the resident drunkard. He'd been drinking kumikumi. The word kumi means 10 in Swahili and kumikumi got its name from the fact that it costs 10 shillings ($ 0.15) a glass. It is distilled alcohol made in a basement somewhere that often includes methane as an ingredient. One glass is supposed to be enough to get a person pretty drunk and it's been known to cause hallucination and blindness. The man kept gesturing to me and grabbing goats and making me take pictures of him holding goats that were trying to scramble away.
Later that night we got a chance to talk with the village elder. First he asked me if we can have more than one wife in America. I said no. He asked why not. I said because the first wife would get angry if you married another wife. He said, "Why don't you just talk to her so she won't get angry?" I decided that the cultural differences were insurmountable with regards to polygamy, but it's interesting that Maasai women are usually thrilled when their husbands take another wife because it means much less work for them to do. In the Maasai culture, a man is supposed to take as many wives as he can, they are a status symbol.
Then the elder asked me if I had any cattle. I said no. He smirked. For the Maasai cattle are the only expression of wealth. They are like a visible bank account. If you are a man with no cattle you have no worth in the community.
Then he asked me if I was married. I said no. He asked me if I would ever take an African wife. I said I didn't know but I'm not a racist. He asked if I wanted to take a wife from his boma. I told him I didn't have any cattle for the bride price. He said that was okay. I said I didn't know how to herd cattle so my wife and I would likely starve. He said that was okay to and extended the offer again. I pretended I didn't understand and changed the subject.
At that point a man crashed into the boma on a bright blue motorcycle wearing a suit. He was the head of the other family in the boma. We talked to him for a little while and went to sleep on a bed made of cow skin.
When we woke up in the morning the man in suit presented us with a 15 year old video camera that he didn't know how to use and asked us to film his cattle and goats so he could watch them later.
We got picked up later that day and went to Amboseli national park. Amboseli has a carrying capacity of about 200 elephants, and there are more than 1,600 in the park. No one know exactly why, but elephants knock down trees from time to time and so the park has been almost entirely cleared of trees which reduces the populations of most other animals. We saw about 200 elephants throughout the day, sometimes as close as 10 feet away, which was pretty amazing. We also saw about 6 hippos, 18 ostriches, 5 warthogs, 1 giraffe, 18 gazelles, 6 baboons, 6 buffalos, and 6 wildebeest(s). I felt like I was playing pokemon snap all day.
Aaron
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