A Little Time to Catch Up

Dudes. It's been quite some time.

So, the last few weeks. What kind of catching up is needed? Let's just start typing and see where it winds up.

Selela is a gloriously beautiful village. Its inhabitants are equally glorious. The campsite where we stayed is surrounded by wildlife (including toucans!), and we were fed truly wonderful food.

The first week we did chicken vaccinations, and then had a lot of down time in the afternoons. For a while we tried to make a hafir, but we hit a layer of bedrock, about a foot deep, that we just couldn't get through. As in, we broke four pickaxes. So, we decided not to do a hafir at that location, and start a new one the next week. Anyway, in the down time, we went on hikes in the mountains of Ngorongoro. We got amazingly close to the rim, and probably could have gotten in to the crater, but then we certainly wouldn't have been back by dark.
Anyway, the place was beautiful.

The other side of the camp, opposite the hills of Ngorongoro was jungle-ish. Adam and I had our Massai knives, and did some glorious bushwhacking. Few things in life are more satisfying than hacking your own trail through the reeds, vines and "bush."


Week two:

It's amazing what one can learn from a classroom full of primary school students! Like, did you know that white people don't breastfeed?

The second week, we had a community group class and then two classes at a primary school. I also spent some time working on the second hafir. So, I was pretty much at the community group every-other day, and hafir the rest. And then I was at the primary school every afternoon. This was probably one of the most gratifying weeks of teaching, because the classes were both so in to it and very appreciative.

There was some minor frustration the first day, but it happens at almost any group in a rural community. The thing is, that many organizations pay people to come to their classes. Their argument is that because people are not working while they are in class, they are losing money. But, the problem with that is people then just show up for money, and often don't even pay attention or learn anything. The organizations often give out way too much money (as in, in one day, more than the students would earn in a month). But, it makes the organizations look better, since more people come to trainings. So it's good for statistics, and to bring in more money, since they train more people. Anyway, the first day many people in the class came expecting to be paid. When we told them we weren't going to pay them, quite a few left. But, this weeded out the people that don't truly care, so we had a classroom full of people who were incredibly grateful for what we were doing.

The primary school had a few "trouble-makers," but not the bad kind. Just a few students who loved asking questions to throw us off or to provoke certain responses they thought would be funny to hear. Like, you know, "what do white people use to masturbate?" or, "why are white men so hairy?" (that one, I believe, was directed at me). "Do white people have wet dreams?" was another one. There were, too, some very good questions, which means they were paying attention and really did want to learn. And, we had a pretty long talk about female circumcision. That is a tough one to talk about, without getting your feelings involved, but they had many questions.

At the end of the week, after we finished teaching the community group, one of the members had written us a speech. It was in Swahili, but Dismass translated for us. Then, he gave me the speech written out, and now I carry it in my wallet. Also, he gave me a Maasai bracelet which is really cool. This was the most grateful a class has ever been, and the most grateful I have ever been for a class. They said they were sorry they didn't have better gifts for us, and I told them we didn't need any, that their gift to us would be for them to share the knowledge we gave them with the rest of their community. I loved that group. They were glorious.



P.s. Glorious is my new favorite word. I may use it inappropriately, but I just don't care.