Maasailand

Hello everyone,

It's hard to know where to start to tell you all about the things I've been doing for the past few weeks. Everyday here can be so overwhelming! Right now we're back in Nairobi for a week before we head off to Mount Kenya. It's funny how coming back to the same place feels like home now. The smells and sights of driving around town here seemes so unfamiliar before.

After we left Mbita we had a travel day that took us to Kisii. While there we visited a soapstone quarry and several loval soapstone shops. Almost all the soapstone from Africa we see in Canada is probably coming from these carvers that we met. They have some problems with middle-men, but one of their biggest customers is the mennonite organization ten thousand villages, who has stores across Canada. They are one of their best customers and buy direct from the carvers at good prices. They advertise all of their products as fairly traded so it was neat to see that it is working for these people.

From Kisii we travelled the next day to the Maasai Mara national reserve. The drive took us into Maasai land and we drove through several of the group ranches that have been alotted to Maasai communities as we drove down to the Mara reserve itself. The landscape of the area is beautiful. It really looks like the classic African savannah image with ridges and escarpments rising up on either side of the grassland with the single flat topped acacia tree in the distance. I'll post some pictures soon I hope.

We camped at a campsite beside a river in an area just outside of the reserve itself. I set up my tent right beside the river so I could see all of the birds and the vervet monkeys in the trees over the river. The river was very low. The further we've been driving back into Kenya from Uganda the more the effects of the extreme drought the region is experienceing have become clear.

This area of the world has two rainy seasons, the short rains run from October to December and the longer rains from March into May. The last two years at least the short rains never came, and the long rains were sparse. Many of the other smaller streams we passed driving into the area had been dried up for months. The people who live in the area are pastoralists. Many of them rely on their cattle and sometimes sheep and goats for their entire livelihood. Dead cattle on the side of the road, and people using ropes to lift cattle who can't stand on their own has become a very common sight as we're driving. Some pastoralists who have the resources are moving their cattle more than five-hundred kilometers across the country, even putting them on trains to move them, to find enough pasture. One Maasai friend who traveled with us for a while explained that every cow he can get through the drought could increase in value almost twenty times when it puts on weight again. Right now many cows would only fetch a thousand Kenyan shillings (about fifteen dollars american) at market.

The next morning we got up at six for our first game drive in the park. We saw far less wildlife than we expected, but luckily I was on the truck with the ornithology professor so learned what all of the birds were along the way, includign the four different kinds of vultures. The game drive that evening and the next morning we took a route outside of the park through the surrounding group ranches. There was much more wildlife in that area. We saw large numbers of buffalo, zebra, wildebeest, thompson's and grant's gazelles, topi and hippos by the river. On the third game drive we finally saw what most of us had been hoping for, lions! Over the next two game drives we saw three groups of lions including adult males and females and several small cubs! At one point we were able to watch a group of two adult females and six cubs nursing for about twenty minutes right beside our trucks. While we were in Maasai Mara we also visited a Maasai village, a clinic, and a conservation NGO working in the area.

From the Mara we drove north again, down into the Rift Valley to Naivasha, one of the fresh water rift valley lakes. We were only there for two days, one of which I spent sick in my tent, so I didn't get as much of a sense of that place. I did have the chance to visit a flower farm. The lake is ringed by huge expanses of greenhouses which take advantage of the fertile soil and the water in the lake for irrigation. There are many issues with the industry. The water level of the lake is decreasing and local Maasai groups are being restricted in their access to the lake to water their cattle. At the flower farm we visited the worker's were treated very well and had very good benefits. Everyone I talked to said they felt lucky to have the job. We learned later however that it was the third company we had asked for a tour at and the others has been very reluctant to talk to us at all. Apparently they had gotten some bad press in the week before in Europe to do with working conditions.

After Naivasha we drove south again, past Nairobi to Nguruman. On the way we drove through Magadi which the staff who have been there before affectionately referred to as "hell on earth". Needless to say we were skeptical. They weren't far off. Magadi is one of the soda 'lakes' in the rift valley. There is nothing lake like about Magadi during a drought. It consists of a huge salt pan which stinks like sulfur with the Magadi Soda Company factory on the edge. This factory produces the majoity of the world's soda which is used in glass production and other industrial processes. It was also 37 degrees in the shade when we were there.

After a two hour stop there we continued on to Nguruman. We kept waiting for the temperature to go down when the sun did, but the low overnight was about 30 degrees and it was 35 degrees at least until midnight! Not fun sleeping conditions in a canvas tent! While in Nguruman we had a wonderful school visit where the school had prepared an afternoon of entertainment for us. The acts we saw were presented by the health club. They were all in the Maasai language and were designed as a way for the students to inform their parents and adults in their homes about HIV/AIDS, the education of girls and other things they are discussing in their classes. The next day we went back for a soccer game with their team.

The other aspect of Nguruman that we explored, especially in my anthropology class was the use of low-tech irrigation methods to grow crops both for local consumption and export. Because Nguruman is located at the base of one of the rift valley escarpments it has a perennial water source from a river which collects water coming down off the escarpment. The land in the area has been kept under one title as a group ranch. All of the members of the ranch are given some land suitable for cultivation which has access to the irrigation canals. The water is switched between the canals manually and each farmer is given access to the water for his crops for twelve hours out of the week. Each member of the ranch also has access to the rest of the ranch for pasture. There is also a third area set aside for an ecotourism project and as reserve pasture for times of drought.

It was a relief to leave the heat of Nguruman after a few days. From there we drove back towards Nairobi and then back down to Elangeta wuas, another maasai village. The valley that the group ranch is located in is much more wooded than the other arid regions we have visited. It was interesting to walk through the scrub acacia forest. All the leaves have fallen off of the trees due to the drought, and there is no undergrowth the ground is entirely sand.

The highlight of our visit to E. wuas was our homestay. In groups of two or three we spent twenty-four hours with a traditional Maasai family, and a local youth guide who acted as our translator. It was an incredible experience, and its hard to know where to start to tell you about it. My journal entry about that day is twelve pages long! For now I'll tell you a bit about the family that I stayed with. The family was quite rich by local standards. There were three households in the compound (called the en'kang), and a fourth being built for the fourth wife. We stayed with the elder wife in her home. Throughout our visit we had a chance to have tea with the second and third wives in their homes as well. We never met their huband as he was about four days travel away with the cattle and goats due to the drought. In the morning we walked back into town with our family to meet everyone else at the weekly market. I hope before we leave Nairobi I'll get the chance to write another entry about that experience in particular.

After another two days in E. wuas we drove back to Nairobi. We had our final exams and presentations for this set of classes today, so tommorrow is out day off before we start the next round! I haven't even narrowed my class choice down to two. The three options are a biology course that will be taught by several different proffessors from Kenya on different topics, a history course taught by an expert on swahili cultural history and a development course called peace and conflict.

Tonight we're going bowling and to a movie which should be an interesting experience! The other night we went to one of the five star hotels for dinner to celebrate someone's birthday. I went to the Japanese restaurant and had some of the best sushi I've ever had! I wasn't sure what to expect from a Japanese restaurant in Kenya.

That's all for now, hopefully I'll get a chance to post some pictures soon!