So it’s been quite a while since I blogged, but as the title of this post suggests life is good! I’ve been pretty
busy with a lot of assignments and other activities of the past couple weeks.
Assignments and field exercises have taken the majority of time in the past
weeks. One of the interesting events that our staff hosted was a shoat roast.
All the goats and sheep here are referred to as shoats because they are always
therded together and difficult to distinguish between. We observed the whole process of
slaughtering, skinning, and cooking a goat in the traditional Maasai way. The
slaughter was kind of difficult to observe and it was interesting to think
about how it’s a part of daily Maasai life. I would rather eat this goat that I know had a good life roaming the grasslands around Kimana than processed meat in the US.
It was a strange chewy texture but quite delicious!
Goat legs roasting by the fire
We had
a non-program day where we had the opportunity to go into Oloiktoktok, a town
that is closer to the foothills of Kilimanjaro. Here we were able to go on a
hike into a beautiful river gorge. The land was so much greener and more
forested than around KBC! We walked through a cornfield that Kilimanjaro rose
above, looking even bigger than usual. Then we descended a steep
slope into a rainforest-like wood around the river. There was a waterfall
flowing down rocks and the air was nice and cool. We spent about two hours following
the river until it ended in a waterfall. It was great to scramble around on
rocks and forget about all of our assignments for a while.
After our hike we
went to the VCT (Volunteer Counseling and Testing) center in town. This is a
clinic where the community can come to get tested for AIDS and those who are
positive can gather to support each other. We met a few women who were positive
and told us their stories about finding out their status and how their life had
been. Although I had seen many videos of people who were HIV positive, mostly
from Contemporary Issues at Rock Bridge, it was a different experience to meet
and hear the stories in real life. The women who spoke to us were so strong!
They had been through so much and even through sickness had taken care of their
children. It was sad to hear about prejudice against condoms that many men and
some women seem to have, not wanting the inconvenience or believing it’s a
product of the devil. In most of the cultures in Kenya, the woman’s body is the
property of the man once they are married so many women have no choice in
protection, even in wearing a female condom themselves. There is a lot being
done to change the perceptions about AIDS and promoting its prevention,
especially by the VCT we visited. They had set up opportunities for people with
AIDS to bead jewelry and do other crafts as an income, since it is difficult
for them to do the usual hard manual labor in the sun while on anti-retroviral
drugs. The VCT employees also would travel to markets to do testing and raise
awareness, although they had recently run out of funding and were struggling to
maintain the clinic. Everyone who tests postive receives drugs free for their lifetime from the Mbrikani clinic (where we donated blood previously). We were able to support the women of the VCT by buying some of their beautifully beaded jewelry.
The river we hiked along
Next we
traveled back to Kimana because we had been invited by our neighboring Maasai
to a wedding! This was a very exciting opportunity to observe a Maasai ceremony
that we had learned about in the culture class. We arrived at the boma full of people and
entered the central livestock enclosure where the warriors were dancing. There were
two groups; one that was jumping and one that was chanting and dancing.
The jumping is a display to attract women and a competition between the
warriors. The warriors or moran are men in Maasai society that are all part of a certain
age group who have already been circumcised. They are the protectors of the society and
follow certain rules, such as not cutting their hair and not eating meat
with women. When we first arrived, a few jumping warriors came up to some of
the girls in our group that were watching and flicked their long hair at them as an
expression of attraction. We watched for a while and as the dancing
opened up to the women, we were encouraged to join in. It was so cool!
The warriors chanted a humming beat while everyone was gathered in a circular
group facing inward. The dance was a chest and head movement with the beat. The
body heat was intense in the crowded group but the humming infected your entire
body and it was amazing to move with all those people, even though we were
probably not dancing quite right. After dancing for a while we saw the bride and groom when they gathered with family to have pictures taken by a photographer from
town, and all of us. The bride and groom looked great with their extravagant jewelry and fabrics.
The the actual wedding of the two had already occured so we were only observing the
following celebration.
The jumping moran and other wedding guests
The bride and groom
One of the more interesting field excercises that we did was an investigation into human-wildlife conflict in our area by walking through several agricultural areas and interviewing farmers. We had a local guide to translate our questions into Maasai. It was really fascinating to get the people's perspectives on wildlife. Several of the farmers told us that their entire farm had been destroyed by elephants and as much as 50% destroyed by other animals like gazelle. None of the people we interviewed said that they had received any benefit from wildlife. Instead wildlife is a huge burden; most farmers stay with their farms during the night, using fire or noise to ward off animals. One man believed that the only solution to the problem of animal crop damage was to kill all of the animals, an extreme but probably prevalent opinion. There seemed to be a lot of miscommunication about the role of Kenya Wildlife Service in wildlife damage as well. Many farmers said that KWS had promised to compensate them for the damage but had never followed through. The Kenyan government has actually banned any compensation for crop damages because they were losing too much money from overestimation of damages by farmers. None of the people knew that this was the current situation and KWS was only continuing the confusion. This emphasized the continuous problems with farming in wildlife dispersal areas and the need for effective methods of keeping animals out of farms. It was cool to actually observe some of the farming practices such as irrigation. The farms are irrigated from a nearby river that is channeled to the fields. Each farmer is allowed to use the water once a week. They have a system of directing the water flow by opening and closing channels by moving dirt so that their seeds are provided with just enough water. The whole process looked quite stressful.
Our expedition to Lake Nakuru was also this past week. We left KBC for 5 days to camp out inside Lake Nakuru National Park, a fenced in park west of Nairobi in the Great Rift Valley. It took us a whole day to drive there since we stopped at the grocery store Tuskys, a coffee shop, a couple curio shops, and had to drive through Nairobi which was busy with traffic. The Rift Valley was beautiful and green with a little bit of a chill to the air. One of our stops was an overlook of the valley escarpment. We arrived in Lake Nakuru in time to set up tents before it was dark. We were in a fenced in campsite complete with buildings for a kitchen, classroom, and bathrooms. The fence kept most of the animals out except for the crazy baboons that were not afraid of people. They have grabbed food out of people's hands before so we had to be careful only eat inside the buildings. They kept the askari (guards) busy chasing them with sticks and shooting them with slingshots to get them out of camp. While we were in Nakuru we had a guest lecture from a scientist in the park and a couple classes related to the problems maintaining a fenced national park so close to a city (Nakuru is the fourth largest city in Kenya and we could see it from our campsite). The main issue is the creation of a terrestrial island through fencing so that the population is isolated genetically and limited in resources. One of our professors had done many years of work in the park, so we had an inside perspective. We had a few field exercises in the park where we counted animals in particular habitats and recorded the behavior of some species. The best part of being in the park was the many game drives we were able to go on. We saw black and white rhinos, lions and their cubs, many cool birds, Rothschild giraffes, and I caught a glimpse of a leopard. The lake was especially beautiful and during one evening game drive we saw a double rainbow over it.
Time has really flown here in Kenya and now we only have a week left! I'm excited to experience Tanzania but very sad to leave the wonderful staff here! It's time to get to work studying for tests before we go...
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