I am afraid—but also excited—that it has reached that point
in the semester where my blog posting frequency will decrease. This week was
really busy, and it’s only about to get crazier. Don’t worry, everything has
been extraordinary!
I’m sad that I don’t have time to dedicate a post to each
thing that happened this week, but I will try to hit all of the highlights: We
had a TON of Swahili classes in preparation for our homestays, I finished my
second paper for class, we had a goat roast, I spent a day with a Rhotian woman
and her granddaughters for my homestay, and I interviewed several Maasai
families about the conflicts they have with wildlife.
My Swahili, while still sadly lacking, is improving slightly
with all of our classes and the encouragement of one of our awesome drivers,
Michael. He was the driver I mentioned in my second post, who asked all of the
questions about America and told us all about Tanzania. To date, we’ve had
discussions about important things we think Americans should understand about
wildlife in Africa, the foster care system and orphanages in America and
Tanzania, driving and driving laws in America and Tanzania, and he always wants
to know random facts, like how many species of snakes we have in America, how
many major rivers are there in America, and what are all of the state flowers.
We talk about all of this in English, and while I think his English is really
good, he still claims that he’s not good enough to be considered tri-lingual
(on top of Swahili he also speaks his tribe’s language). Sometimes he’ll ask me
to say something in Swahili, and when I say I can’t, he’ll say, “Just try,” and
then make me look it up in my Swahili book or go up to someone who knows
Swahili to ask them. By the end of the semester, my goal is to have a whole
conversation in Swahili with him because he asks so many great questions and
starts so many interesting discussions in a language he isn’t necessarily
confortable with. It really inspires me to learn the language he is comfortable
with.
On Wednesday morning, the camp got two goats. They were
very, very cute and they very much enjoyed wondering around camp eating all of
the green grass. In the afternoon, I got to experience what happens to meat
before it becomes meat. It wasn’t fun, but I think it was very important,
especially since I am a meat eater. We had the option to watch and even
participate in the whole process, including holding the goat while it was
killed and skinning it. I didn’t help with anything, but I did watch and I did
handle the organs once they were out of the goat. There was a veterinarian
present to inspect the meat to make sure it was OK to eat (it was), and she
pointed out all of the different organs to us. In the evening, we enjoyed a
feast of ugali, rice, veggies, veggie burgers, chocolate peanut butter clusters
(the first dessert we’ve been given minus the birthday cakes), soda, and fresh,
grilled goat.
On Friday, I thought I’d get to expand my Swahili knowledge
more with my homestay. I was placed, however, with a woman who speaks
phenomenal English, so I didn’t get to use too much Swahili, but I did learn a
whole lot of other things. This woman, Martha, started a local project here in
Rhotia called Project Rhotia. She is supported by two people from California,
who were tourists she befriended a few years ago. Project Rhotia is a program
that teachers schoolchildren how to use computers. SFS students sometimes help
this program during our community service days. Before starting Project Rhotia,
Martha was the headmistress of the local primary school. As I said, her English
is impeccable and her ideas are even more amazing. We basically spent the
entire day talking about a wide array of problems that local people face, but
also some of the triumphs they’ve had. I think my favorite story was of Maasai
women who would trick their husbands into saving money for their daughters to
go to school and who would also keep track of how many cows their husbands
owned by using beads and tying knots on their skirts. Martha very strongly
believes that ideas are much more powerful and beneficial than money, and she’s
also really into women empowerment, which I think is so cool to to see in an
almost 70 year old rural village woman.
Martha also has two granddaughters living with her and her
husband. Her husband mostly took care of the cows and then walked to the church
for the afternoon, so we didn’t see him much. He seemed very nice. Her two
granddaughters did most of the cleaning and cooking. Her granddaughter Grace
had just finished secondary school, so she knew English, but Martha said
Grace’s English had run away from her that day because she was shy to speak it.
I adore Grace, even though we didn’t talk much. She is super giggly and sassy
and just reminds me of what we consider a “typical” teenager from back home. At
one point, she climbed a tree, put headphones in, and listened to music for an
hour or so. But, of course, she can also cook a whole meal over a fire and milk
a cow and clean all of the families’ dishes by hand.
My day at Martha’s house was actually pretty laid back. Mike
said some people might work a lot during their homestays, and some people might
just end up sitting around some old lady’s sitting room drinking tea. I
definitely got the latter, but it was still a good experience. When I arrived
at Martha’s house, she gave Meg (the other SFS student I was with) and I some
delicious chai (Swahili for tea) and
then had us sit in her sitting room while she got prepared for the day. Her
sitting room was basically a mixture of both of my grandmother’s apartments.
There were pictures of the pope and Catholic prayers on the wall, family
photos, a comfy couch and two comfy chairs, and a big cabinet with dishes,
cards, and pictures in it. Martha has a pretty nice house for the area. It’s
made out of cement and painted tan and red. It has four rooms—her sitting room,
her room, her husband’s room, and Grace’s room/the guest room. I can’t tell you
about her kitchen though, because she told me not to. I think she was kind of
joking, she liked to joke a lot, but still, all I’ll tell you is that the kitchen
is separate from the house. She has a gas stove, but she usually doesn’t buy
gas for it, so she and her granddaughters cook over a charcoal stove and an
open fire.
Meg and I attempted
to help cook. I cut some of the meat we brought (oh yeah, every student brought
food and water for ourselves and the family. It was both a safety precaution
and also so we didn’t place an extra burden on the families) and Meg chopped a
few vegetables. It was really hard, though, because, as Martha said a lot, “We
don’t have cutting boards in Africa.” After a few attempts from both of us,
Martha and her granddaughters finished the vegetables. I wanted to help cook,
but Martha sat us down under a tree so we could talk about Obama, Hillary
Clinton, and politics in both America and Tanzania. She did let us watch Grace
make ugali, so now I can try to make it when I get back to America. Once lunch
was done, we all sat down and had a big meal. Then, everyone but Meg, Martha,
and I took naps. The three of us spent the next three hours talking, and then
we made more chai, and then we talked
even more! Martha did tell us that there was an unusual amount of downtime at
this point in the year because the dry season is lasting a particularly long time
and there is no work to do in the farms. We were in the middle of a really
interesting conversation about Maasai women when Pasquali and Fausta came to
pick us up. I was sad to leave, but Martha doesn’t live too far away from camp,
so I’ll be able to visit her a lot. She says she also comes to see students’
directed research presentations, so I’ll get to see her then too.
The most recent field exercise for my Policy class involved
interviewing Maasai people about the conflicts they have with the wildlife. We
were all driven about an hour and a half away from camp to the very edge of
Tarangire National Park. We were then put into groups of four, given two
guides, and then driven to a boma (a
cluster of Maasai homes where a family usually lives). These bomas were in the middle of the dry
savanna, far away from any sources of water. Most of the women weren’t at home
because they were off fetching water.
It can be hard to reconcile why we’re doing these field
exercises. They’re essentially practice for when we do our directed research. Right
now, we can’t do anything about the issues we’re told about. The Maasai, too,
are frustrated, and many of them told us that so many people interview them but
nothing ever changes. It was actually pretty uncomfortable because our guide
kept telling us the Maasai were joking about these things and joking about
asking for tips, but then a group of woman cornered us and wouldn’t let us
leave without giving them 1000 shillings. It wasn’t too big of a deal, 1000
shillings is less than a dollar, but they were not happy with us by the time we
left. That was when I realized everything our guide said the people had been
joking about wasn’t actually a joke, and he was just trying to make us feel
comfortable. I think the one thing the Maasai were actually joking about was
how burned we white people were going to get while standing around a shade-less
grassland in the afternoon sun. Yes, our guide actually did translate that back
to us. It wasn’t a mean joking either; they made sure to invite us under shady
trees if one was around.
What we found from the interview wasn’t necessarily
surprising. Elephants and zebras destroy all of the Maasai’s crops, but they
can’t retaliate back because it is illegal to kill the wildlife. If they were
to kill a zebra who ate their crops, they could go to jail for over 20 years.
Lions and hyenas also kill their livestock. One of the women we talked to had a
donkey killed by a carnivore just three days before. The government doesn’t do
anything about this, and the Maasai are really frustrated about that. It’s so
difficult to beginning thinking about even a theoretical approach to solving
these problems because so many people face them. Plus, many approaches create
more unforeseen issues. The change between discussing these issues in the
classroom and seeing them right in front of you is a big one. Once you’re out
of the classroom it stops being a fun, fascinating issue and just becomes a
sobering, overwhelming challenge. I know I shouldn’t let that scare me away,
and I’m trying not to, but, as I said, the change between classroom and real
world is a tough one. I suppose that’s exactly why I’m here though, to
experience the field of conservation outside of the classroom.
Anyways, I could talk for ages about this, but tomorrow is
the start of our Tarangire National Park expedition and I need to go to bed.
We’re spending the next five days camping right outside of Tarangire, and then
doing a bunch of field exercises in and around the park. I’m so excited!!
