Tuesday evening, I headed out to meet up with my family in Maasai Mara. Traffic, rain and a certain pair of corrupt policemen lengthened a four-hour ride to six, and we arrived somewhere in the neighborhood of 1:15 AM. I wanted to go to sleep. “Let us take a late dinner!” Are you kidding? No, thank you. I’m not hungry. Seriously, I just want to go to bed. “At least warm your stomach!” Right. Whatever. I give.
Wednesday, we headed into the bush in the middle of nowhere (otherwise known as Maasailand) and got dropped off with two guides, a cook and three porters. We walked across the scrubby desert, found a tortoise, passed several houses and crossed a dry river before arriving at the outskirts of Naarasura, a small town situated at the base of the Loita Hills. Tents were set up in the front yard of the mud house of a family of seven: a mother, two daughters and four sons, the youngest of whom was named Lydia, nine years old, and in Class (grade) 5. Lydia, who was entirely grossed out by my nose stud, lives in a tiny shack in the yard constructed of burlap and several sheets draped over wooden poles. It contains a small bed, a fire, a pot and three stools. In addition, we shared the yard with a bleating goat tied to a post, a dog, and a corral containing three cows and a calf.
That afternoon we walked into town and found market day in full swing, the land awash in blazing red and orange blankets as Maasai bartered en masse and made their way home, decked out in layer upon layer upon layer of beaded regalia.
After dinner we lit the travel menorah with birthday candles and celebrated the eighth night of Hanukkah with Lydia, her mother (who spoke only Maasai and Kiswahili), and the rest of our company.
Thursday morning, Lydia and I traded earrings and a blue beaded bracelet before she left for school. We made our way through town and up into the hills, climbing through scrubby, thorny trees and over light orange rock sparkling with minerals under the sun. As we crested the first hill we looked back over the desert below us, stretching unmarred past Naarasura and its distinctive blue-roofed school into the distant haze. We descended into a valley and continued through sand and mud and planted plots, sharing the trail with Maasai warriors and women much more badass than myself, running marathon-plus lengths through the hills as part of their daily business or returning home bowed under the firewood stacked high across their backs. Oh, and convincing endless herds of goats and cows to Part the Red Sea and let us through. Please and Thank You.
When we passed through a manyatta that consisted of (according to Zach) 1 husband, 7 wives and 25-30 children, we picked up a tail of two men from the community. Who turned out to be something a bit akin to Maasai bandits. Because the Maasai believe the land and the road (aka barely discernable dirt track) are theirs. And we paid fees to cover passage in the nearby town of Narok, which were supposed to be distributed throughout the community. But this is Kenya, and the dough got stuck in a bank. And the community wanted their money anyway, and didn’t care that we had already paid, so as we walked a conversation ensued that involved excessive repetitions of the word “pesa” (money). An hour later when we arrived at a river teeming with tall trees decked in masses of vines, the warriors charged ahead of us, posted themselves by trees on either side of the path and shoved their spears into the ground. An elder arrived to contribute to negotiations, we sat down on a log to wait, and a geezer super drunk off of traditional brew (which commonly makes people go blind) showed up and started claiming that we all belonged to him. In Maasai. While shaking a traditional club decorated with dozens of bottle caps with the tops cut off in our faces. After another half hour, in which the conversation moved off to the side into the vines, voices were raised and the warriors’ pangas (crazy badass knives) appeared to be drawn, money changed hands and it was decided that we would camp on the opposite bank.
That evening around the campfire, we traded stories from our homelands with our guides. Simon, our cook, made phenomenal food over the fire. Peter, one of our porters, is the nephew of Ganisha, my guide on Mt. Kenya. Julius, our other porter, is possible the quietest person I’ve ever met.
John, our lead guide, is Julius’ brother. He told me he used to drink. Then he started climbing Mt. Kenya, and realized that in order to guide professionally at high altitude, he was going to have to cut the habit. Now, when kids from towns he passes through help him to carry things, he pays them the money he used to spend on beer.
Mwangi one of the most companionable people I’ve ever met, is from Nanyuke, a town to the west of Mt. Kenya. When I asked him what was the craziest thing he’d ever paid off a cop for, he told me a guy once decided to arrest him for walking across a street while on his phone. And because he was late to the airport to pick some people up and couldn’t take the time to go to central police station, he actually had to spit up the dough. And he told me about the first time he came to Nairobi and went to the bathroom, and had never seen a toilet, so he stood on it instead of sitting down.
Zach, our Maasai guide, is involved in a campaign to stop the tradition of female circumcision within the Maasai community. Apparently uncircumcised girls are viewed as childlike and unmarriageable, so they seek out the procedure in order to be attractive to men. He told us how, in our present day and age, the communities elders determine who will live a traditional life to maintain the culture and who will go to school to become a “Clever Maasai.” Those who maintain the traditional lifestyle then go into the bush for three years to survive on their own, following circumcision at 15. They kill a lion, transition into manhood, and are welcomed as something akin to heroes upon their return. Zach, however, asserts that he wants only one wife and 3-5 kids, so that he can pay for them all to go to school. He was astounded that I have the freedom to reject a man’s advances. However, he’s also grown up in a society in which, when a man wants a girl, he goes and steals her, takes her home, announces his intention to marry her to her parents, and then begins negotiations. He also explained the Maasai tradition of hospitality: if a man comes to a manyatta and there’s another man his age, the visitor is welcomed into the host’s house to spend the night with his wife. They stick a spear in the ground in front of the door to let the host know the visitor is still inside: simple and to the point.
Friday we walked down into a valley and followed a river through a forest called the “Lost Daughter,” named after a girl who ventured in with her father and never returned, passing below black and white colobus monkeys and scattering a group of baboons. After departing the forest and climbing a gentle slope, we emerged at the edge of a set of escarpments from which we looked down around 2,000’ to grassy plateaus and a flat acacia desert that merged into ridges and hills far into the distance. To either direction, cliffs rippled and folded as they twisted and turned in their sheer drop to the land below. As we continued through the heat to the beginning of our descent, my seemingly-ADD self became somewhat distracted and left behind when I decided that playing with a two inch chameleon would be the best use of my time. Which wouldn’t have been an issue, except that then I was somewhat alone in the bush, and the next thing I saw as I walked down the path was a sizable, sleek black serpentine head appearing from the brush to the side of the trail about four meters in front of me. Which turned into a good eight or nine feet of slender, glinting, slate-shaded freaking BLACK MAMBA slithering across the trail. To which my reaction was an decidedly intuitive, “Holy shit, that is a Giant Black Snake!” And then it anticlimactically meandered its way into the shrubbery and disappeared among the acacias.
We set up camp beside a river running at the base of the escarpments, next to another tiny Maasai town called Ngumu. I think. We soon picked up an audience of a dozen gawking kids, who instantly determined that my meager Kiswahili promoted me to “most awesome mzungu ever.” I subsequently passed the afternoon by jumping off ledges into shallow water, learning to swim “Maasai style,” playing kids’ games that dredged up vague memories from my childhood (but substituted with Maasai words), trading stories and enduring somewhere in the neighborhood of ten pairs of hands assaulting my hair at once.
Saturday morning we walked into town to await our ride. I passed an hour sitting with some old women selling tobacco and salt and meticulously beading jewelry beneath a giant tree that had scattered tiny, sticky fruit all over the ground. I spoke a little Kiswahili, the women taught me a word (maybe two) of Maasai, they laughed at me (a lot), and two of them bestowed strings of beads upon me- to remember them by.
For some yet-to-be-determined reason, we ended up walking several kilometers across the scorching desert before meeting our van. On the way back to Nairobi we passed through Magadi Lake. I’m sure at one point it was stunning, surrounded by crazily formed eroded rocks, banks crusted with dazzling white minerals. Presently, however, the body of water has been divided and sectioned. Entire sectors consist of muddy sludge, sucked through pipes to a processing plant where soda and salt are withdrawn and sent off by the trainload to be processed for sale. It is the epitome of living death.
Sunday we attended Sylvia’s (my host mom’s) nephew’s wedding. We found ourselves accosted by a girl from a small town upcountry who gushed ceaselessly about how she dreamed every night about the chance to go to America, and that her one wish in the world was to raise her children there. We then had five awkward minutes in which she asked for my phone number, I told her I didn’t have a phone, she stared expectantly between us, and we pretended we didn’t know she wanted us to get her immigration paperwork. Then my mom asked, “Which state would you go to if you came to America?” “Columbia or Mexico!!!” Uh huh.
Gotta Love It.
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