Travel to Tungamalenga (Sunday, July 26)

We left Riverside this morning, and drove to the Isimila Stone Age site. Lots of stone tools have been found in this riverbed area from stone age societies about sixty thousand years ago. The Isimila River, which runs in the rainy season, has carved out a canyon with natural sandstone pillars.

Isimila Stone Age Site

We hiked down through the canyon, and the scenery was almost reminiscent of the American southwest. We spotted a rock hyrax, the closest relative of elephants and manatees, high in a cave in one of the cliffs. The weather was beautiful--breezy and warm, and it was wonderful to get outside.

Group at Isimila Stone Age Site

After our hike, we set off for Malinzanga village to visit two Maasai households, traveling down bumpy one-lane dirt tracks. I fell asleep in the van, and was awoken abruptly by Mike, telling us to get up, there'd been an accident. Everyone else in the van woke up, looking around groggily, and we saw an overturned pickup truck in the ditch on the opposite side of the road, with fifteen or twenty villagers clustered around it. Another of our vans was stopped just ahead of us, but we couldn't tell what had happened. All of the students in the van involved in the accident were unhurt, but the driver, Saidi, had hit his head when the two cars collided, and was sitting woozily on the side of the road. The pickup truck carrying the villagers had at least four people sitting in the bed, and they were thrown from the truck when they hit our van. We quickly emptied two of our smaller trucks, and loaded Saidi, and the injured villagers in to go to the hospital. Meing'Ataki went with them to make sure everything was taken care of as well as possible. Fortunately, Saidi was not seriously hurt, but we still don't know what happened to any of the villagers that were in the car. We found out later that the driver was probably drunk, and was driving on the wrong side of the road. He lost control and wasn't able to swerve back into his lane or stop in time. Saidi was able to pull into the ditch on his side, and the truck's bed smashed in the front diver's side of our van. It was really scary when we didn't know what was going on, or if everyone was safe. By the time we left, there were at least a hundred villagers surrounding the vans and the site of the accident, and lots more people running down the road to see what was going on. We were all a bit shaken up, but had to get moving so that we could move our vans out before the roads were totally swamped with people. The vans made a few trips, and we met back up a few kilometersdown the road to regroup and continue to Malinzenga.

Scene of the car accident

The first stop in Malinzenga was a household that had updated their boma (homestead) to institute some changes for security and reducing disease transmission. They had a ring of acacia branches around the outside, with the thorny sides facing out, and two entrances that could be covered with acacia branches at night. The houses made a ring just inside the outer "wall," and the livestock "pens" were in the very middle, again ringed with thorny acacia branches. The thorny walls provide security for the livestock--and people--from lions and hyenas, who predate on them, and the separating of the livestock from the people's living spaces limits disease transmission. The head of the household welcomed us to look around, and the women brought out beaded jewelry that they had made for us to buy. We took lots of pictures of the women and kids, decked out in their colorful kangas (wrapped skirt/dress combos) and beads.

The second household we visited was headed by Mzee Silendu (I'm not sure I'm spelling that right, but that's how it sounds), and they put on a traditional welcoming performance for us. The men came in, circled up, chanting and taking turns jumping up and down. Then the women moved in, shuffling slowly and singing, and formed a circle, singing and dancing around the circle. Meing'Ataki joined in the men's circle, and encouraged the Envirovet men to join in as well, dancing and jumping together. Once the welcome was over, we sat down--men on one side of the circle, women on the other--and Mzee Silendu gave a short speech welcoming us to his homestead. We traded welcome and thank-you speeches for a short while, and then had chai (black tea) and "something to bite," as Dr. Mutekanga said. The "something to bite" was goat cooked over a fire, and as it would have been impolite to refuse--and I didn't know how to begin to explain why I didn't want to eat the goat in Swahili--I took a piece. When they said bite, they meant it--my jaws aren't accustomed to free-ranging Maasai goat meat, although lots of our group thought it was delicious. The chai was much more my cup of tea (terrible pun intended!), hot and full of sugar.

Maasai woman with her kids

After we shared tea, the girls group moved off with the women to tour Mama Sara's house. She is the Mzee's first wife, and had six children--four grown, and two young kids still living in the homestead. Her house had three rooms, one room for her for sleeping and cooking, one for Mzee to sleep, and a room in the middle for everything else--sitting, entertaining, relaxing, hosting visitors. We got to ask Mama Sara about her life and Maasai customs, and then look around the rest of the village. We saw the goats returning to the boma in the evening, and the women again brought out their handmade traditional beaded jewelry and crafts for us to buy.

Muzungu and Maasai: Me, Joanna and Helen with the Maasai

The experience visiting the Maasai was really interesting, and almost surreal. I kept thinking I was at a museum, or performance of people showing us what their lives used to be like, not how they really live every day now. It was hard to believe and still hard to internalize people living their whole lives this way. There were fewer unexpected intrusions of modernity or technology than I've noticed elsewhere here, but the Mzee did have a cell phone. The Maasai women are considered adults at age 14, and are married off at that age, so even though some of them may have access to primary school education, few of them continue to secondary school or university. The Maasai tradition of having everything separated by gender--the women and men have different responsibilities, eat separately, and really live entirely separately--seems very unfair to me, but maybe that's because of the American failure of the idea of "separate but equal." I guess what is important is whether life for the women and men is equally happy and pleasant, or difficult and challenging.

We finally arrived a Chogela campsite on the border of the Ruaha wildlife management area after dark, and had to thank Deanna and the staff for setting up our tents for us so we could eat dinner and relax around the campfire.