Tengeru

We had a little outing on the weekend to one of Arusha's cultural tourism programs, Tengeru. It was a lot of fun and was made all the more hilarious by some fantastic new students that have come to the house. We started off by learning about their biogas project. Basicallly, they keep a few cows, feed them scraps and hay, collect all their poop, push it underground where it produces gas, pipe the gas out, filter it, and then it goes straight into the house for cooking. Absolutely ingenious. I can't work out why more people don't use this system.

Next we went off for a walk to the coffee plantation. I think I found the other guys hilarious because their minds are constantly in the gutter and conversations were full of inuendo and sarcasm. Suddenly it wasn't just bunches of bananas hanging in the trees.

It was so nice to make some little friends on the walk.

Anyway, we went through the whole coffee making process. From picking the beans...
 

To shelling them.

To roasting them.

To grinding them.

And, finally, drinking them. It was actually quite a unique taste. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it was the best cup of coffee I've ever had.

We finished off with a hike to a waterfall. There were lots of monkeys about and for a while we thought they were throwing rocks down at us. Turns out it was a bunch of kids, but I like the monkey story much better.

 
Till next time x

Warriors and Women

Back to some more village photos today. Let's start with the men.

It is definitely a 'man's world' in Maasai culture. You get many wives. You never have to kiss, cuddle, snuggle or show affection in any way at all to any of those wives. You have no responsibilities other than your livestock, but once you have children you can send them to sit in the field all day with your cows. You are allowed to get drunk if you like, or disappear into the woods for weeks, or just lie around all day having 'simba time'. Whatever really. AND you get to walk around with a big knife and a big stick, play with fire and kill things. How great is that?

Occasionally, if the mood strikes you, you might get together with your mates and practice your dance routines. 

I guess these guys think they deserve the easy life. They did go through a lot to get to Warrior status after all. That little thing called... circumcision. Ouch.

In Maasai culture, male circumcision is done at around age 18-20. It sounds quite traumatic. It is dragged out a little with some hard questioning from the elders, a beating or two, some derogatory name calling and then finally they are made to lay flat, completely still, while someone slices their foreskin with a possibly blunt and/or dirty knife. If they flinch, if they even so much as bat an eyelid, they fail, and will be shamed in the community. Their family too. Who ever said men don't have a high pain threshold?

But all this lack of responsibility makes them quite fun to be around. Especially if you get a bit of Konyagi into them (its a spirit somewhere between vodka and gin). We took them some bottles as a thank you for hanging out with us. They viewed it more as a challenge and proceeded to down it all as fast as they could.

This ended up in a messy scene with warriors toppling over everywhere, arguments about who was the real leader in the dance routine thing and a few near misses with spears and knives as they proceeded to jump and fall about.

It is hard to remember that the lifestyle in the village is 100% authentic for these guys. There is no 'putting it on' for the tourists. This is real life. The wonder and delight at discovering how an ipod works or looking at the half naked girls in a fashion magazine was as real as any I've ever seen.

Anyway, on to the women. I just thought they were all stunning. I was a wreck without any mirrors or makeup or hairdryer or straightener for the week. These women live like that and were all the more beautiful for it. (I wish I had more photos but they were generally not too keen on having their picture taken).

 They work incredibly hard though. All the chores, cooking, cleaning, washing, milking cows/goats, raising the kids, building the houses, fetching water, going to market etc etc etc. It doesn't really end. I wanted to ask the women what they did for fun but I just got laughed at. There is no time here for fun.

They are also responsible for creating an income so that they can buy all the things that they cannot grow like rice and sugar. Crafts are a common income source.

We had a nice chat with all the mamas. They were interested to know about (discrete) contraception options and we wanted to know whether they would want their daughters to live a traditional Maasai life or not. It certainly seemed to be a hard one.

It struck me that while our lives in the west are generally ruled by pleasure, here they are ruled by necessity. We choose the food we eat for pleasure, look for jobs that give us fulfillment or satisfaction, choose a partner that we love to be around, spend our money on toys and gadgets that amuse us, buy cars that thrill us and buy clothes that enhance the image of ourselves. These Maasai do none of those things. Everything here seems to have a much closer link with survival rather than pleasure.

They still seem to laugh a lot though. That, I know, is for pleasure.

Till next time x

Happy Australia Day!

I wanted to take a little break from village stories to do a little Australia Day post today. I was thinking of everyone back home in the rain - I hope you managed to celebrate in style despite it. We had a really good day here. A few of us Aussies took the opportunity to go and visit The School of St Jude. Some of you may have heard about it as it's been featured on Australian Story (ABC) and Sunrise (Ch 7) quite a few times. It is an amazing school here that has been set up by an Australian. It is only for the brightest and poorest children (they have requirements that must be met for both these criteria) and is run on donations, mostly from the Australian community. It was so much better than I had expected. Truly inspirational. I have forgotten all their amazing statistics about how fast they have grown and all the students' achievements, but if you want to read more you can look them up at www.schoolofstjude.org If you have some spare cash lying around I would highly recommend throwing some their way. I thought it was a great environment with excellent staff and a really worthy cause.

We got to peak in on a few classes. This is 2A english.

And art class.

I was so excited to find Australian flags painted up around the place and even a cardboard kangaroo!

'Stuck in the mud' must be a universal game.

Brushing up on a bit of anatomy.

One of the libraries.

At the end of the day we got to ride home with the kids on one of the buses. Being in such an amazing school with all the kids being very polite and orderly and dressed neatly in school uniforms it was easy to forget that these kids come from extremely poor families. We quickly realised it again though when the school bus suddenly crossed the railway tracks and we began hurtling through the slums. It must be so hard for the kids to go between two such extremes. I wonder if it creates a divide between them and their families. Our guide had said that even in the older students who board, there can be a lot of tears on a Friday when it comes time to go home to see their families. They just don't want to go.

But what an opportunity they are getting though.

The night ended with a BBQ (of course) and we counted down the top ten for Triple J Hottest 100. It was a pretty decent effort for an Australia Day I thought. We Aussies held our own but we had to work pretty hard. There was only 5 of us...

...and then a whole bunch of Poms. We have become quite a big crew all of a sudden!

Till next time x

Village Medicines

I guess, seeing as the point of me being in Africa is to do a medical elective, I had better tell you today about the clinic I was working in while in Engaruka. It was a fairly basic affair. One building with 4 rooms. One for injections and administering medications, one for deliveries, one for storing vaccines and one for consultations. Some days it was busy, like this, antenatal clinic day.

Other days it was quiet, like this.

My favourite day was child clinic day. I sat outside and weighed babies by hanging them under a tree. So much fun.

 Their local doctor had unfortunately passed away last year. A new one has been assigned but no one really seems to know when he will finally appear at the clinic. So it was just us and the nurse holding the forte this week. It seems they have a very low threshold for treating respiratory infections and malaria. Everyone with a cough or headache seems to walk away with antibiotics and antimalarials. The worst thing we saw was three little un-immunised kids come in with severe cases of measles. The nurse had to help us through that one as none of us had ever seen measles before! They looked very poorly. The most unfortunate thing though was that they had sat in the waiting room full of antenates for about 2hrs before we saw them. I hope those mums had all had their immunisations!

Many of the patients coming in had strange little scratch marks and scars all over them - even some of the babies. Apparently this was local medicinal techniques that involve rubbing ash and other things into shallow wounds/scratches. I would have loved to have known what they were supposed to do. We didn't go to any local medicine men but what we did do was go to see the local spiritual healer! Here he is.

He is apparently training his son now to take over so it was he that read our stones for us.

It was a strange little process. He jiggled around a bunch of stones and marbles, had us spit on them, and then  counted them out into little piles. For me, he first looked a little uncomfortable and told me (through Lewis) that he would have to give me something to shower with in order to improve my luck. Great. Not off to the best start! But then he managed to tell me, without having any information about me whatsoever, that I was with a very good man and would be with him for many, many years to come. I was thinking, 'tell me something I don't already know Babu!' So then he managed to get around to mtotos (children) and happily informed me that I would be having three and that I was not challenged at all in the fertility department.

Thanks Babu...so I'm not barren..what about some lotto numbers?

I didn't get any lotto numbers, but he did let us milk some of his goats. Well, 'try' to milk some of his goats.

I'm not sure if I believe in Babu's rock counting magic but it was fun to hear his predictions for everyone. Thinking back to it, I was actually quite nervous about what he was going to say.

Two days later Babu came along to our clinic. Apparently curing pneumonia isn't within his healing repertoire. We sent him home with some penicillin in case the rocks don't work out for him.

Till next time x