Class today involved speaking with very traditional natives who are part of the Maasai tribe and visiting an elementary school to learn numbers in Swahili from the kids. SOOOO much better than sitting in class back at home!
At the boma, which is just the Swahili word for village, we were greeted with four songs the Maasai sang for us. The women and the men sang and danced, which were more like jumps but it was pretty cool. It was wicked African. They were wearing the typical dress which was bright colored fabric covering their entire bodies. The Maasai are very modest and cover up their shoulders all the way down to their ankles. They even wrap their babies and toddlers up in the same fabric in order to carry them on their backs! The women have large holes in their ears for multiple sets of earrings and wear beaded necklaces that look more like collars, called wedding necklaces.
After their performance they showed us around their huts made of tree branches, mud and grass. Inside it was kind of cramped with two small beds, one for the mother and the small girls and the other for the dad and the small boys. There was also a small stove and a few shelves for storing cooking utensils. Two tiny windows the size of my hand were built in for the smoke to come out. We interviewed them afterwards, asking questions relating to their lifestyle to their homes to conservation issues. It was really interesting to hear how they actually appreciated the national park nearby, since it is a major tourist attraction and makes a significant amount of money for them. They moved to this main tourist road in order to make a greater income by selling jewelry made of beads and metals. Women make a million shillings a year from this craft, and since the African Wildlife Fund has provided price tags and name tags, the individual woman who made the piece of jewelry profits from her own sales. At the more rural boma not located on the tourist road, women are not allowed to own livestock and have no source of income, so the national park and tourism is truly their livelihood.
Later in the afternoon after Environmental Policy, we headed up the hill to the elementary school, where we were greeted by hundreds of young children running towards us. It was overwhelming. They all wanted to shake all of our hands and repeated, “Jambo!” or a more local dialect. At one point I had like five kids hanging from me. They would fight over holding the mzungu’s (what they call us, meaning white people’s) hands and would push each other out of the way to get more attention from us. In the classroom we taught them Row, row, row your boat and then they taught us numbers. The three little boys I was sitting on the bench with were shy but very smart. One of them took a piece of paper out of a makeshift notebook, made of loose leaf paper with thick layers of newspaper as a front and back cover. He began writing and speaking to me in English. He was a great teacher! He made me say each number and each hour of the day in Swahili, then taught me a song to learn the Swahili numbers. It was pretty impressive.
We went outside afterwards and some of the group played soccer with the kids. It was Mzungus vs. Watoto (White People vs. Children). Not sure who won, as I was over with the majority of the group learning Swahili games and songs in a circle. They cracked up when they were teaching me clapping hand games since they were so complicated and I couldn’t get them right. Finally we played a game where they called people out in the circle and we came into the middle and did a dance. The two kids hands I was holding were so eager they nearly dragged me into the middle. These are the new friends I made at school today:
Of course we have class tomorrow even though it’s Saturday…but we get Valentine’s Day off! That’s all for now!
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