Villages

Yesterday 25 July we went to Margoni Village where we vistited with a family and helped them on their farm. They grew maize, beans and sunflowers as well as some livestock. We helped harvest sunflowers which they would later press into oil. So there I was in the field, slicing the heads off the flowers and then beating the faces with sticks so the seeds would fly out onto a tarp. For something that sounds so violent, it was both fufilling and relaxing work. It felt good to actually do something to help another family.
























Harvesting sunflowers.


The family next showed us around their village and we stopped at the primary and secondary schools. We caused quite a fuss showing up at the primary school. We walked back past a couple stores, the community well and then rows of corn on the way back to their house. All in all it was an amazing day.





















The middle of the village and inside one of the classrooms at the secondary school.



Today was also quite a good day as we headed through Arusha (west) to Maasailand. We first stopped at this Western-run school which was an interesting experience. On one hand, the school was a great facility, environmentally friendly, had a great donor base and was providing good opportunities for many orphans and very poor students. But it was a little weird, a little too Westernized for some of our tastes, as our guide (who was U.S. American) complained that English was not taught in the primary school and had a few more comments about the building of the school and such that seemed a little ethnocentric. In its worst forms, I was reminded of Native American government schools.



We continued on west for about 45 minutes on roads of various materials and degree of upkeep as the landscape grew drier and we passed small herds of cattle and goats. After climbing up a road through some open jungle-like landscapes, we arrived at the Maasai village we were going to this day. We met Geema, a woman who is actually English and married a Maasia man. Another Maasai, Ben, then gave us about an hour-long tour of the area and village. We walked past their waterholes where people filled plastic buckets to put on donkeys or cattle drank. Once an old man stopped us as Ben cut a branch off a bush that was their toothbrush (which by the look of their teeth worked very well). The man wanted Lori to take his picture and she promised to bring him a copy when she returned in January. This exchange is very common. I also got his photo before he looked at the photo on Lori's camera [below] (this is another pasttime sure to please people, especially children - good thing for digital!).











We walked across a wide expanse Ben said had been an old lake bed, then went up to the village where kids ran out and greeted us with wide smiles. Not really any adults though. About six of the kids followed us a ways back towards the market and other part of the village, holding hands with many of our group and having a thoroughly good time.








We had packed lunches at Geema's house, then walked around the market. Many of the sterotypical images you think of the Maasai are completely true: men and women both wear the checkered, blue, red or purple cloaks, men carry tall sticks, etc. National Geographic does get it right I guess. But besides the mud-walled huts that we walked to, we also passed through a very different type of Maasai village on our drive: shops and businesses in among the cattle herds, advertisements for cell phones next to a warrior leaning on his walking stick. Interesting contrasts. The market was interesting with cooking fat in large yellow plastic containers, wrapped candies, the famous Maasai sandals made from tires and of course many different patterns of cloth to choose from. I bought a piece of bright cloth for 4000 Tsh (about $4) and talked with two young men making and selling the shoes for a while [photo left].

After the market, we talked with Geema for awhile about the secondary school she is helping with that has a unique and highly-successful indigenous knowledge program. After they got around the government red tape of having to stick to a set curriculum (for tests - does this sound familiar) and ridiculous rules such as having classrooms exact dimensions) students are now able to learn from their elders information about rituals, plants, proverbs, traditional medicine and historical daily lives, knowledge that may otherwise be lost as they focus on Western, formal education. Quite the contrast to the other school we visited and I am now interested to learn more about the program. We will be visiting this school when we stay the two nights in the Maasai boma next week.