The Maasai Life

      Sorry this is a late post from Monday!! Internet is quite Spotty!     

After being cooped up for 5 days I was feeling a little antsy. Despite being in a different country, on a different continent, we have all been inside the confines of about a mile around circular camp. We’ve now had all of our classes at least once; Wildlife Ecology, Wildlife Management, Environmental Policy and Swahili and East African Cultures. Swahili is a beautiful language and it’s really fun to learn. I’m also seeing how much easier it is to learn a language when you are immersed in it. I guess that’s what I’ve always heard and it sounds obvious but I’m real experiencing it first hand. The staff here are all native to Kenya except Mike our Student Affairs manager. Side note on Mike though he is incredibly talented when it comes to explaining things, for instance yesterday I asked for the whereabouts of the volleyball court and my exact words were “Hey mike, Where exactly is the volleyball court, I know they are over there [and I pointed “over there”] behind the Banda’s but that’s it.” His response was, “Yeah, it’s over there… behind the Banda’s.” Believe it or not, the volleyball court was behind the Banda’s. Back to the Swahili though here are some of the common terms I’ve learned:

Jambo! –  Hello

Hapana – “no”

Ndiyo – “yes

Mimi ni mwanafunzi – I am a Student

(handy in lowering bargaining prices)

Maana yake nini – What does that mean?

Samahani  -Excuse me

Tafadhali – please

Asante -Thank you

Ghali – expensive

(like Golly that’s expensive)

chai – tea

mzungu – white person

(not handy in lowering bargaining prices)

Maji – water

Habari ya asuubuhi – Good morning

            That’s probably enough to soak in, but at least it helped me with my studying! Every time we pass a staff member or someone outside the fence I always say Jambo or ask how they are. They make the effort too. It seems there is a mutual understanding of the fact we are here to learn as much as possible. Since we are 30 white people behind a fence in the middle of Maasai land in Kenya there definitely have to be some rumors floating around the community. It may kind of appear like a zoo, especially when we run in a group around the trail resembling pacing animals but SFS has done a very impressive job of integrating our community with the local community. Today was a perfect example of that. We went about a mile down the road to the nearest Maasai village. There are no tourists that come to this Maasai village that SFS takes each group of students to. When we go there we shook all the mamas’ hands and then all the mamas, about 30 of them, lined up and sang for us. The songs were really beautiful. There was an older mama who led the song and all the other mamas would respond. At one point, 5 of the mamas started jumping out of the line to the beat of the music. They started jumping towards us and then grabbed a person from our group to jump with them. I got to jump woo!! We then had to respond with our own song, which was way harder than it should have been. American culture doesn’t really have too many songs other than the national anthem and happy birthday that everyone knows. We ended up mumbling “This Little Light of Mine” and “We All Need Somebody to Lean On”. Our culture needs to work on that. Then the mamas got in a circle and spread out their mats to put out all their jewelry and other crafts. We all filed into the circle and started looking for what we wanted to buy. It ended up being pretty stressful. There was so much to choose from and every time you squatted down to look at a bracelet more closely the mamas would put about 3 bracelets on your wrist and say “sawaaa” which means okay. One woman kept putting a bracelet on while I was taking them off which was a fun little game. I ended up getting two bracelets and two necklaces. It was a unique opportunity because it wasn’t from a souvenir shop or a market stand, and we directly saw the community we were benefiting. When we got back to the camp, our Swahili teacher Daniel and Sapiah, the program assistant, showed us a real Maasai spear and demonstrated throwing it. They both had said, although they were now a conservationist, the human-wildlife conflict in Kenya is a huge problem. Daniel said he owns cattle to remain a part of his tribe while he is working at SFS and he is committed to being a conservationist, however if a lion or a hyena comes to feed of his livestock he wouldn’t hesitate a second to kill it. I’m really looking forward to learning more about this issue and hopefully working on some potential solutions.