My Cup of Joy is Overflowing

The title of this post is a quote from the center director, Okello. I thought it was a great way to describe the happiness I feel for being here in Kenya. This last week was very eventful! It began with a non program day where we had the option to tour a local clinic and give blood. The clinic was part of the Mbirikani Group Ranch and was very impressive! They have modern equipment and provide free care to the group ranch and anyone diagnosed with HIV for life. The clinic was founded by a woman from Chicago and is still completely funded by her which must be an insane amount of money. After seeing the entire clinic including inpatient care wards, diagnostic lab, and the fridge with only 3 partially full bags of blood, many who were unsure about donating decided to go through with it. The whole process was very slow since there were 22 of us donating and everyone had to get their blood tested and vitals checked. As we waited, we saw a woman come to the clinic in ambulance who was having labor complications. Her screams of pain were consistent for about 3 hours before she was transferred to Nairobi. Apparently her baby was positioned incorrectly and she needed a c-section but Mbirikani didn’t have an OR and she was stuck in a cycle of contractions that couldn't be stopped. It was hard to listen to, but reminded me that our blood would be directly saving lives of the local people like her. Apparently all our blood would be used in about 2 weeks and the clinic would be able to treat some anemic patients that they hadn’t been able to help previously. It was a wonderful experience and I’m especially glad I was able to donate, since I won’t be able to for quite a while in the US (since I’m in a Malaria country now.)

The next day was our community service day where we visited a local primary school. The school consisted of one building divided into 5 rooms for each grade. There were about 40 kids in each small room with a couple chalkboards and shared wooden desks. The classroom I was assigned to was supposed to be 9-13 year olds but none of them looked older than 10. We played Heads Up, 7 Up with them and a game involving leading rhythms. Then we were taught a Swahili game where we were supposed to jump when the animal that the teacher named was something people eat and you were out if you jumped for the wrong animal. The game was called nyama, nyama, nyama (meat, meat, meat.)
Here's a picture of the kids playing:

We also went outside and played other games including frisbee and soccer. In general I was very impressed with how the kids behaved. There were so many of them in a small space and they were so quiet and polite, not at all how I would expect that age group to behave in the US. The kids were all really cute and some of the girls who were fascinated by my hair, braided it into two front braids which looked "very smart" according to them.

                                 My beautiful hair-do courtesy of Charity (on the right)

Later on in the week we performed a transect walk for our environmental policy class which turned out to be very interesting! We walked along the remnants of the Kimana fence, a fence that used to enclose part of the Kimana Group Ranch and was electric but wasn’t maintained. We began to walk along it and immediately saw a giraffe head in the distance. As we moved toward it more appeared, there were about 8 in total including a baby. It was so cool to be walking that close to wild giraffes! They let us get about 50 feet away from them. Our task was to record the landscape and interview any people we ran across with the help of our local guide. We talked to two Maasai herders with cattle who also owned irrigated farms nearby where there was a water source. There was no water source where they were grazing their cattle except for rainfall. We saw huge erosion ditches that were formed in the wet season from the water flowing from nearby hills. We also came across a boma where women were building a house. Apparently they had moved there 2 years ago following the good pasture. I really enjoyed actually seeing all the land uses we have been talking about in class and actually hearing about the resource issues directly from the local people.

                                        This is how close we were to the giraffes!

 Later that day, we had a Maasai woman come to speak as part of our culture class about the role of a woman in the culture. It was fascinating to learn about the amount of responsibility women have without having any rights to property. Maasai women are currently working towards a more equal status, helped by education opportunities. Another thing they are working to fight is the practice of female circumcision which is done traditionally in the Maasai culture to graduate a girl into adulthood and curb their sexuality. The Kenyan government has outlawed it, but it’s such an integral part of their culture of maturation that it is still practiced. This brought up a conflicting idea about whether the culture should be preserved as it is or be modernized. Many times I feel like the Americanized view of how people are supposed to live is forced onto people like the Maasai that are living a different type of life. It’s a fine balance between preserving the culture and bringing in beneficial ideas for the health and rights of the people.

                                              Part of the Maasai boma I stayed in

I was able to actually experience the life of a Maasai woman as well during my homestay in a Maasai boma. We were assigned to bomas in pairs and dropped off at around 10 in the morning. We brought our host Mama bags of food as a gift for allowing us to stay with her. Our host was Joyce who had 8 children. There was a huge language barrier because we still don’t know that much Swahili and everyone in the boma spoke mainly Maasai with a little Swahili, and barely any English. We communicated with the little Swahili we knew and a lot of charades. The beginning of our day consisted of drinking lots of chai (tea) in the house and meeting some of the other women that lived in neighboring houses. My guess was that they were all wives of one man (the Maasai practice polygamy.) We also met a couple of the men who were herding the livestock out for the day. Then we went to fetch water from a pipe in a nearby field where it was being pumped for irrigation. The jugs were carried back using a leather strap that you put around your forehead, letting the jug rest on your back. At first I thought it was somewhat comfortable, but after walking for 10 minutes, my neck started to hurt. The women must really have strong necks! After fetching the water we made lunch from the food we brought consisting of cabbage and ugali.  Ugali is a cake made of maize flour that is pinched off and eaten with the accompanying food. Everything was cooked on a woodfire inside one of the rooms in Joyce’s house. This was a very hot procedure, by the time we were done I was sweaty and hungry. This was good because we were served HUGE portions of food which was all delicious. All the children and the other women were fed as well.

                                                        Ugali and Cabbage

We ate in the main room of the house which was a lot cooler but full of flies. It was hard to get used to the feeling of flies constant crawling on your skin. I ate as much as I could and then we cleaned the dishes and swept out the house with a grass broom. After lunch we learned how to bead the Maasai jewelry. It’s pretty cool how much of it is recycled. They use strips of the woven plastic sacks twisted together as string and plastic pieces as some of the beads along with the glass seed beads. They laughed at how slow I was with the tiny beads and my inability to twist together the strips together for string. They were very skilled at the whole process since they take a lot of pride in all the jewelry that they wear. We also gathered firewood using a strap technique similar to the water jugs for carrying it back. I’m so glad I was able to actually experience living in a Maasai house and the tasks that I would be doing if I was a Maasai woman. At my age I would already be married with 2 or 3 children. One of the biggest differences I noticed between a day in my house and my day in the boma was the pace of life. Between doing all the chores of the day there was a lot of sitting around talking (or listening to them talk in Maasai), beading, and interacting with the children. These times were very relaxing which was juxtaposed with the hard work of carrying water and wood. When we departed at 5 that night, Joyce gave both of us a necklace. It was touching and I felt like I could have spent more time there learning to speak Maasai and taking care of the household.

                                                Carrying some firewood with Joyce

The next day was another pretty special experience. We went to Amboseli again to participate in the census of all the animals in the park. Each car was assigned a block of the park and we had to count everything and determine the number of adults and young. We would come upon huge herds of zebras and wildebeest with impala and reedbucks mixed in and have to record all the numbers along with a GPS position. To give you an idea, the highest number of zebra I counted was 243. This was only one section of the herd. It was kind of stressful but also fun to ride around in the car with a KWS officer directly helping in wildlife conservation. We didn’t see any animals that were different than those we had seen on our last visit to Amboseli but I don’t think I’ll ever get over the elephants everywhere.

The week ended with a non-program day where we were able to go to a lodge outside of Amboseli. We got to stuff ourselves at their buffet, relax, enjoy a few Tuskers, and swim in the beautiful pool. The only negative part of the week was the departure of one of my fellow students back to the US because she started having serious respiratory problems with an unidentifiable cause. We will all really miss her and it really emphasized to me how horrible it would be to have this experience taken away from me. I am so happy and lucky to be here!

In the observation tower at the lodge