Being a tourist

Cultural Manyatta

Me and a monkey at a lodge. This is how I feel about most monkeys, even when they ARE cute and have babies attached to them.

Monkey by the pool! This one was very cute. 

Today I was a tourist. Part of our learning about Maasai culture and tourism includes a comparison between what tourists see and what the reality of life is for people around here. With this in mind, they planned a tourist visit to a Maasai “cultural manyatta,” where the Maasai showed us around their boma (village) and danced and sang for us and sold jewelry, and then a luxuriously enormous buffet lunch at the nearby lodge and swimming in the pool. It was so strange to eat lunch in a room that looked like it could easily be a nicely decorated dining hall at home and be waited on by immaculately dressed waiters, after spending two weeks now eating and studying in an open air room and sleeping in a room that is occasionally invaded by a stray millipede or spider or bat. The only thing that tipped me off to the fact that we were, in fact, still in Kenya, was the fact that as we sat by the pool we had to defend ourselves from the vervet monkeys who tried periodically to get into our bags and steal things!

The cultural manyatta and the lodge visit were interesting and relaxing, but I felt like a lot of the truth of life here, at least what I’ve seen of it, was hidden in the process. It was a very tame, very luxurious and beautiful experience, but I think in order to start to understand this place you have to walk around in the village and realize how small and dusty it is, go to the market and see where the Maasai men sell their cows next to their parked motorcycles, or talk to the farmers about the drought that killed their plants. I wonder what kind of effect the tamer, “nicer” Kenya that tourists tend to see in a short time span affects their perception of the country, the people, and their life here.

Tomorrow, in contrast, we will be spending the entire day in pairs visiting Maasai bomas all over the area around Kimana to see what their daily life is really like and help in chores and whatever they decide to do during our stay. These are people who are not part of a cultural manyatta, but who live nearby and have been contacted by SFS and asked if they would be willing to host students for a day. This is a relatively new process for SFS as far as I know, and seems very interesting and like it will be quite a leap for everyone. I’ve been inside two Maasai huts so far, and have found out that they cook over a fire inside (which the women we will be staying with will most certainly want help with) and that there is no ventilation or light inside the hay/mud huts. It should be a really eye-opening experience whatever we end up doing. I am very excited. I am also a little bit happy that it is not overnight as I had originally thought, because I was a bit apprehensive about sleeping on the mud floors without my beloved mosquito net until I was told yesterday that we would only be spending one day at the bomas. Even without staying overnight, I think it will be an incredible learning experience and quite a contrast to what we have been up to today. 

As a side note: remember the bush babies, those adorable little tree-dwelling creatures? I posted a picture of one earlier on. I went on a walk this evening and found a few of them in the usual tree, and found out after watching them for a while that they are able to jump meters into the air to grab branches, and hop up and down on the branches like little springs! Cutest animals ever. I think I have decided to take one of them home instead of the original plan to tame a lion…