The Masaai Village Part II

Waiting patiently to be registered for baptism


Registering for Baptisms


Masaai home


Village bathroom

*** Click on the pictures to see them bigger***

While we were driving the final leg to the village, Pastor H became quite confused about the directions our Masaai friend was giving us. After some lengthy back and forth in Swahili, Pastor Haffermann figured out that he was taking us to a brand new congregation that a pastor had never been to. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania uses a network of evangelists to run their congregations and develop churches in new communities. These evangelists have usually been through at least primary school (they have to be literate so they can read the bible) and then the church will send them to bible school when they commit to becoming an evangelist. They run the services at their respective congregations with the exception of giving communion and performing baptisms. This is why it is such a big deal when Pastor Haffermann comes for a service. The congregation is able to receive the sacraments and there are ALWAYS new baptisms. He gets to some churches once a year. It's been fun to see all the little boys named Haffermann running around the villages.

Masaai Girls (and one boy). These kids are probably mostly siblings.

When we pulled up to the "church" we really pulled up to a Masaai home. The Masaai are polygamous, and the men usually have up to five wives throughout their adult lives (they marry them over a period of years) and sometimes have more. A household consists of a large circular area that is separated from the wilderness by a fence of bushes and dead shrubbery. The animals of the family can be brought in there for safekeeping when they are not out grazing. The biggest house is the one where the husband and his main (first?) wife live. There are smaller houses for the other wives and their children around of the rest of the circular enclosure.

In this particular yard, there was a big old tree (they don't grow very tall but kind of spread out and provide some thin shade - from my observations the goats find them to be quite tasty) and this was our church for the day. Benches were brought in from the church we had thought we were going to. We watched the Masaai men bike in with four wooden benches strapped to the back of their bikes. They did this over an eight mile distance where there are no roads. We all stood there with our mouths open watching them pull up with four church pews strapped to their bikes.

The Church

Right away when we got there they began serving us tea, as has been done everywhere we've gone. They had moved out that family's herd of cattle from next to the tree right when we got there, but apparently the flies decided to stay with us rather than follow the cows out. I have never, NEVER seen so many flies and they were ALL OVER us. I thought I was either going to start crying or develop a nervous twitch before too long. It was one of those moments when you truely have no idea how you will make it through the day. They handed us massive tin mugs full of their special ginger tea and we spent the next half hour fishing flies out of our cups with our fingers and wiping them off of our chipatis because fanning at them did nothing. They didn't leave. Mercifully, by the end of the day I hardly noticed, but it was really awful. The women who came to greet us each had at least 30 flied each sitting on top of their shaved heads and didn't seem to notice, so it must always be like that there.

Because Pastor had never been to this congregation, there were going to be a lot of baptisms. Whenever we go to a village, he leaves us after tea and spends the next chunk of time registering the baptisms for the day. Each person has to go to him and give him their name, date of birth and so on to fill out their baptismal certificate. In a developing country, any official document that has your name and birthdate on it and is signed by someone of a certain position is worth a lot. It can be used as a legal document in some cases, so that utmost care is taken when filling it out. This is a problem, however, when people have no idea what year they were born in and refer to the season of their birth rather than the month and day. Because of this, and the spellings of names, registering for baptisms is a long process that takes a lot of narrowing down dates and consulting with family and neighbors to get things pinned down. It takes forever.

The registration process took four hours on this day. The people just kept coming and coming. This left us to hang out under the tree with the dozens of Masaai who intermitantly showed up in groups big and small. At one point we heard singing off in the distance, and we got to watch and hear the choir from the other church walk up to us from the wilderness singing in harmony at the top of their lungs and walking in time the whole way. I took video of it on my camera. They circled around our tree and sang song after song until they ran out and realized church was probably still a few hours off. Then we all just hung out for the next few hours. This meant a lot of different things.

Phil and his 20 new best friends killing time during baptism registration.

I spent a lot of time watching the newborn baby goats in the yard (they still had their umbilical cords!) while I got laughed at by the warriors. It turns out that inspecting their animals is a huge compliment so I was actually doing a really good thing. Chellie taugh about 40 kids how to count to 100 in English after singing every song she knew with them (we did have four hours). Dr. Strickert suggested to me that I break in with some 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall and I heartily agreed with him on the merits of learning to count backwards in English, but never quite got anything stated. We had a big squishy rubber ball with us that the warriors first started tossing around. It was fascinating for us to watch because it was very easy to catch as far as balls go, and they could not catch it to save their lives. They had no idea what to do with their hands. It was the same thing when three of us played frisbee with some of the men. They were very interested and jumped right into a game we had thought would be for the children, but could not catch it. They looked like toddlers who don't have the gross motor control down to make the hand eye coordination happen at all. These guys live in the bush and herd cattle all of their lives. The only times they use their hands are when they are smacking cows with their big sticks or are cutting up meat. We were told today that they sometimes even hire villagers to build their mud and stick houses because they have no building skills. They are true herdsmen and don't try to be anything else.

My favorite part of the day was when the little boys got ahold of the ball. There were tons of little boys there on this day. They were each wearing a piece of fabric tied over one should and not anchored at the waist. If they're not moving much, everything is easily covered. If they are scrambling over a new toy they have never seen before, there are little penises and butt cheaks flying all over the place. It was quite a sight and I got a huge kick out of it. This was the day when I finally stopped being shocked everytime I saw a woman wip out a booby to feed a fussy baby. They do it all through church and even while singing in the choir. It's just the way it is here.

When church finally started, it was late afternoon. After this experience, I think church outside under a tree is the only way to go. You could hear the baby goats bleating for their mamas, chickens would occasionally run through everything and the birds were singing away. I loved it.

There were 59 baptisms at this service. It was a little shocking to afterwards realize that this only comprised of two polygamous families. The evangelist there was completely ostracized when he became Christian, but on this day, all of his brothers, their repsective mothers, wives and children were all baptised. It was a very big day for him. Being Christian does not change much of the daily lives for the Masaai. They do not need to change how they dress, eat, or make their money. They just go to church on Sundays and join the choir. The big thing though is that the men are not allowed to take any more wives. They are not forced to get rid of the wives they already have (this would be a death sentance for the woment and their children because of the shame, so the church repsects that), so not much changes for the older men. For the young warriors who may not have taken any wives yet, it is a very serious decision to make. Once they are baptised they folow the rules of the church. The baptised Masaai also agree that all drinking of alcohol stops (there are issues with alcoholism within the culture) although this is not a rule of the church.

Lining up those to be baptised

Adult Masaai Woman

Newly Circumcised Young Warrior (all in black)

A Warrior

Woman and Baby

Watching the Show

Choir members trying to see the action

The baptisms took well over an hour themselves. This is where it started to get interesting. The Masaai believe in evil spirits that can inhabit the women's bodies. We had two exorcisms that day that began while Pastor Haffermann was saying the final blessings over these two particular women. One only carried on for a while, the other went on for hours.

Now, spirits and evil in this form are not something I believe in. Mental illness and the power of attention seaking, however, are two things that I do not doubt. Most of our group was quite disturbed by what was going on or at least really freaked out (except for the good professor of religion who is also an ordained pastor and did mission work for six years in Papua New Guinea who just sat in the shade and did number puzzles and never showed that he noticed that there were women thrashing about on the ground and "speaking in toungues" a few feet away - gotta love this guy). I however made a few quick observations and was not really bothered or all that impressed by any of it. There were well over a dozen women baptised that day. Almost every single one of them had a baby strapped to her back. The first woman to lose it was the only one of all of these women to take her baby off and set him down next to her before she went up to be baptised. The only one. The second had no baby at all. I have watched enough tantrums, rages, and psychotic breaks through my job taking care of adults with disabilities, and these battles with evil spirits were nothing out of the ordinary from working with people with psychological disorders or who just need attention and know how to get it. Her poor little boy screamed bloody murder at the sight of his mother writhing on the ground and fought and fought the lady holding him back until he got back to her. Then the violent shaking stopped when he was in her lap and resumed when they took him away. I'm not buying it.

As I said, a lot of my classmates were deeply troubled by these events and we are still talking about them now. Most people feel that it is a battle nothing less than spiritual in nature. Pastor says that this happens whenever he goes to a new church. This is just how it works in the Masaai culture. One time he had eight women freak out at one group babtism. It was a lot worse than our two, and we had Grant and a whole lot of other people to pray over them and calm them down, and eventually a husband to haul the one who just wouldn't quit home. Pastor ended up completely skipping the sermon due to the amount of baptisms and other distractions (the choir left an hour before the service was over because they had to walk back their many miles to milk the cows).

It was after dark when we finally left. We had to stay for a meal, our lunch at 6 pm when the service was finally over, again eaten under that same tree. You do not leave without eating, ever. We spent seven hours at that one congregation and didn't even get enough time for a sermon. It was quite a day. To get back out, we had to follow some warriors on bicycles through the wilderness because there was no way we could do the road we came in on in the dark. They did a good job of keeping ahead of us and avoiding a lot of tees. We had to stop every so often so they could untangle their bikes from the bushes.

I hope I've done a semi-adequate job of explaining some aspects of Masaai culture. If anyone has questions about them and how they live an function in a world so different from them, just let me know. We've been spending a lot more time with themand they are just a wonderful and fascinating people.


Where's Waldo?

Some Morani roasting up a goat for lunch



Itty Bitty Goats


Masaai Girls