Happy Thanksgiving!
Time has passed more quickly than I think we all realized. We leave for India tomorrow yet each day we’ve spent in Arusha has felt like the longest day ever. We’ve been here between break out trips in the North, basically just finishing up classes and assignments, going through “Tanzania processing” and finally getting online. After Moshi we arrived here only for a night before we packed day bags and headed out to Ngorogoro Crater and Lake Manyara conservation areas.
Probably one of Tanzania’s most distinguishing and stunning aspects is its wildlife. From our vantage points in Ngorogoro crater, on tiptoe atop the jeep’s seats and through open doors in the roof, we watched in awe as thousand-head herds of wildebeest, zebra, and gazelle grazed lazily past. Hippos and buffalo could be found in the few water holes adorned with varying bird shoulder ornaments to take care of the pesky flies or other such fun insects. If not large mammals, there was always the sea of flamingos or the sky-whitening flight of pelicans spooked by the engine rumble to peak ones interest. Running giraffes stopping to chew the tops of the savannah-friendly acacia trees, ostrichces ruffling their fluffy black feathers at our disturbance, the female warthog snorting loudly at the gaggle of eight speedy little piglets fighting for the room beneath her belly, and the occasional lions or black rhinos off in the distance, visible only thought binoculars, were some of the speed up, slow down, screech to a halt highlights of our safari. Lake Manyara also allowed us a peaceful ten minutes, sitting on the roof now, sighing deeply as we carefully followed the hypnotic rhythm of elephant trunks as they reached out, strong and confident for that nearby patch of grass, ripped it firmly out and back around into their small hidden mouths between two giant pointed tusks. The warmth one feels for the giant grey wrinkled bodies sprinkled with dainty grey hair and possessing two teary back eyes gives away a deceptive feeling of safety amongst a family of African elephants, but our trance was abruptly broken by the sharp crack of a tree branch broken effortlessly by the disgruntled matriarch, the alpha female, watching her baby wander too close to the cars…and time to move on. At night we ate a lot of rice and beans (neither of which are indigenous to Africa but make up two staple foods of our diet here, hmm) slept in the chill of the North, bundled in sleeping bags within our village of blue tents. Occasionally a trip to the bathroom would win you a run in with the pack of zebras that liked to graze in the campsite or the enormous elephant with his trunk in the water tank. Sometimes too, the sunrise over the rim of the crater could steal your breath in the still silence of morning.
Returning to Arusha, we repacked the day bags we were back in the jeeps for a two hour “African massage” ride along dirt roads to Terrat, a village in Maasai land. After our first class with Olenasha our temporary Maasai anthropology professor on the culture, what to expect during our homestays, key phrases, customs, meals, dances, etc, we all left the classroom we were using in the village and happened upon a full goat, hanging by its ankles in a small acacia tree and in the middle of being skinned by three Maasai gentlemen for our welcome dinner. Mbuzi is goat in Swahili, although that did not really help us as the Maasai speak Maasai—what little we knew of Swahili and what had helped us make small talk in previous home stays was not going to help us here. A boma is a circular enclosure containing the huts, wives, children and livestock of one to three men, usually brothers. Accompanied by a Maasai warrior security detail and five translators the 29 of us (28 students and our environmental policy professor) walked the 20 minutes across the red, dusty savannah to the Matinda boma, our host’s namesake. We spent the evening coddling the babies, herding in the cows with sticks made from the cores of trees, milking, dancing, and generally doing our best to fit it, as hilarious as that was for our Maasai host families. After standing in the chilly night and soaking in as much as we could of the billions of twinkling stars in the enormous sky, which coincidently is the same word in Maasai as God, we retreated to our huts where our mamas would have cups of the sweetest, milkiest chai(tea), as hot as the fire in the hole in the earth floor. We sipped and smiled and said thank you in excess, as it was the only word besides hello we knew, and quietly slipped into the sleepy silence that comes with a day herding cattle in the sun, and finally fell asleep on a huge rawhide stretched across a wooden frame, dazed from the heat and smoke that filled our tiny house. The idea for keeping the small herd of tiny goat kids in the hut at night is to keep them from drinking their mothers dry, but after a few nights of lurching awake from being nudged, or licked, or horned in the feet, and being awoken every 4 minutes starting at 4:30am by the starving cries, the darling baby goats start to lose their appeal, but for the Maasai lifestyle, they’re only the alarm clock. I’m leaving out a lot of stories here, but suffice to say, we left our home stays reluctantly by the end, having shared a lot, but not nearly enough with our families and friends we’d made there.
A week of vacation was the rest of our time in Tanzania, and I spent it on the beach. Sam, Adam, Bronya and I took the 8 hour trip back out to the coast to Pangani, where we had the incredibly good fortune of staying with the Aunt and Uncle of Sam’s good friend from Sarah Lawrence, experiencing the best of good food, four charismatic dogs, and a private beach on the Indian Ocean. Glynn and Debbie, thank you thank you thank you.
Next Stop: New Delhi and the India program.
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