This village was unlike all the others I have visited in other more important ways as well. To get to it, we headed in the opposite direction from the usual course into the broad scrubby grazing lands beyond Morogoro and instead backtracked toward Dar a bit and then up into some of the lower mountains.
I was immediately confused by this. What are cattle herders doing on top of a mountain? Pastor Hafermann referred to them as refugees, and I spent the rest of the day seeing how refugees in this part of the world live.
This little guy just made me melt. Cutest kid ever.
Actually, refugee is not the correct word since this group came from within Tanzania. Rather they are internally displaced people or IDPs. I was expecting a tale of intertribal warfare that drove them off of their lands and into the hills. As more and more of the traditional grazing lands are taken up by farmers, tribes now have to compete for the space required to feed the cattle that make their whole world work. Closer to Morogoro this has ended in several deaths between the Masaai and Barubai. Yet this did not end up being the case with this group.
So what displaced these people? Enlarging the national park lands around Arusha.
While lions, leopards, and water buffalo are now able to live more freely than they have in a long time, the Masaai who had lived there were unceremoniously kicked off of THEIR land with no reimbursement from the government of Tanzania. And so they set off walking, old man, woman, and child alike, until they ended up in the mountains in 2000 where they wouldn't be bothered too much by the locals. They walked for hundreds of miles, with all of their herds and wordly possessions from Arusha which is by the border with Kenya.
My first observation at this village was that these were the skinniest children I had seen. They had the stereotypical skin and bones look of the images so often associated with Africa. It's been six years and they are still working on rebuilding their herds. In a culture where they live off of maize and milk (Masaai women don't get any meat) it makes for a very precarious existance.
I guess I should be flattered then that when I was sitting with mch Hafermann, some nice looking young warriors came and joined us. It didn't take long for me to pick up on the fact that the conversation was about me. The offer for my bride price by one particularly spunky gentleman was 70 cattle! That's a mighty nice sized herd! Pastor said he'd give me to him for only 69, but that the young warrior had to herd the cows back to America to give to my father. Another chimed in that that was nothing and he could do 75. So there's a feather in my cap!
A phenomenon witnessed at all Masaai villages when letting the warriors play with your camera: 50 of the exact same shot of their confused friends' faces at point blank range.
And this is what happen when a bunch of silly little boys get a hold of it.
On another note, there was a tall , strong young man in the village who had drop seizures the whole day we were there. Apparently he only used to have them once a month or so but they are now very steady. I could tell by his gait when I first spotted him that something was just a little bit off. The electricity running unchecked through his brain is starting to eat at his gross motor control, even when he is out of the seizures. It was nice to see how the village sheltered him and watched over him. He could have very easily been their dirty little secret, hidden away and never mentioned when the white people came. Instead, the way they all as a community looked after him was nothing short of tender.
I've seen a lot of seizures with the job I worked the last two summers in Anchorage, and after some discussion with Pastor Hafermann, he went in to town on Monday to try and purchase some phenobarbytol for the boy to see if it might get him a little more stable. If they become less frequent, he may be able to regain some independence and quality of life. This drug is the building block of most seizure meds and is pretty much his only option here. It cost $2, which is an amount this village could never afford.
I somehow manage to find myself in a crowd of little boys everywhere I go!
And while the little boys crowd, the girls sit and stare. There just have to be different standards for how they act in public from what I've observed.
The green hats have the president's face on them and can be seen everywhere. They were given out during the last presidential campaign. Up until just recently, this party represented by the green color was the only one allowed in the country since independence.
In case you were wondering, church is a perfectly appropriate place/time to breastfeed. I got over that one at the first church when we counted five different women doing their motherly duty at the same time at a certain point. If you go to Africa, be prepared to see a lot of bosom.
This was my little shadow for the day - of course the only time he turned off his ear-to-ear smile was for the camera (you can tell they'd never seen one before at this village). He was one of the tinier ones. I thought he was four, maybe five, and he turned out to be seven. He thought by making friends with me he was going to get a ride in the car at the end of the day and looked like I'd just eaten his favorite puppy when I had to peel his fingers off the car door and gently set him back on the ground at the end of the day.
No comments:
Post a Comment