Here at camp Friday morning is cleaning morning. So after sweeping and mopping the floor we had breakfast and then hoped in the land cruisers and headed to visit a Cultural Massai Boma (room/house). It was about a 30 minute drive from camp so we arrived a little before the day turns hot. The cultural boma (or Manyatta in Massai) is a small Massai community built right beside the road. Tourists can visit the village bomas and learn more about the Massai culture. They also have a store full of beautiful jewelry for sale. This was our Massai Culture class for the day. This community was constructed and is run entirely by the women of some of the Massai tribes in the area. They live there for 2-3 years before going home and trading places with another woman (typically another wife of their husband’s). All of the profit made from the store goes directly to the woman who made each piece of jewelry. This enables them to buy property of their own (usually cattle and goats). In their rural homes they own no property; it all belongs to their husbands. Anyways, we had a tour of a typical Massai manyatta and an extensive question and answer session with the help of our translators (the Massai don’t speak Swahili and we don’t really speak Swahili – talk about language barrier) which was very interesting. We were given about fifteen minutes to browse through the shop and I took full advantage of the opportunities to buy. One of the things I bought is a brass (at least it looks that way) bracelet. It literally is twisted on (it goes around my wrist a bit more than three times) by hand and is just a smooth length of metal. To take it off, it’s recommended that you use pliers. It’s pretty but I wish it was slightly easier to get off!
This afternoon was pretty exciting too. For our Swahili Class we went to the local school and had the kids teach us numbers. I must admit I felt really stupid much of the time. I had about 10 kids sitting all around me and I couldn’t remember how to count to ten in Swahili. Once I had stumbled my way through the numbers somewhat correctly (we went all the way to 100) they began teaching me time. That was interesting since they call seven am or pm one o’clock and continue counting that way (8 is 2, 9 is 3 etc.) using certain phrases to differential between morning, afternoon and night. Its very confusing and sine they speak very limited English and I speak NO Swahili……you can imagine how productive it was. But we were all laughing by the end. Before we went back to camp a group of boys and the soccer players of our group started a game of soccer and the girls taught the rest of us songs and games (we played red rover w/ soooo many people)! I have no idea what the songs meant or were saying but all of us were willing participants and had lots of fun. It was a long day and homework, as usual, stretches out ahead of me…..
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