save water, drink beer

day 2 with the maasai:

if you can’t already tell from the title of these blogs, gladness really enjoys her booze. she’s also a big fan of meat and eats as much of it as possible at every meal (more on that later).

I was up before 6, it was still dark out (I think, correct me if I’m wrong, that because we’re only 3 degrees south of the equator in lengasti, that the sun rises and sets at pretty much the same time every day), and I needed my headlamp to find my pants and fleece before leaving with thu and jennah. we headed out to one of the boma’s in hopes of helping with the morning milking. a boma is an area defined by a ‘fence’ constructed of branches of this plant that are covered in inch long thorns. talk about security. pretty much only the occasional stray and emaciated cat dares to navigate the thick blockade created by these thorny plants. they build pastures for cows and goats with them, drape them along the edge of their hay roofs so that the donkeys don’t eat it, and create boarders for their huts and land. we followed the sound of the noisy goats and came upon a pen packed with maybe 50 or 60 goats. there, a group of maasai were on the far side, mostly children, all with plastic cups in hand, finding the mother goats and pinning the babies between their legs as they bent to milk the mama. they made it look so easy! let me tell you, it is far from easy. getting the milk out is a trick, and trying to do it while keeping the hungry baby away is downright impossible. I needed to enlist help from the other children to hold the baby and show me again and again how to squeeze the milk out. ok, so im impressed with their goat milking skills. the children were getting a kick out of our struggle and I have to admit, it was making me laugh as well.

from there we left the milking to the kids, we were wasting their time with our futile attempts to get milk in the cup. gladness led us on a walking tour of the area, past mud huts quite literally made of cow poop (that has to smell great when you heat up the inside with a fire). we stared at the donkeys in one boma as we passed and they all stared back, a little creepy to have so many matching eyes on you. it is best to watch your footing around here, there are random carcasses (usually of goats) from recent kills. usually, if a baby is born in the village, a goat is killed in celebration. they leave the hide out to dry and then use it to sleep on. that and cow hides make up the beds. you can see why bugs might be somewhat of a problem as we would later observe firsthand in clinic. we walked down the ‘main highway’ as gladness called it – a winding dirt road hardly distinguishable from the rest of the dusty bush. gladness was leading us to her maize field. she had hired a guy to guard the maize, which has already been harvested. she hollers to his tiny hut, we can see smoke seeping from cracks in the ceiling. a male voice calls back and soon a man appears, removes a spiny branch from the ‘fence’ and karibu’s us to enter (karibu = welcome). we get to peak inside his tiny hut, even standing in the doorway my eyes are watering from the smoke of the small fire. there is another person inside, it hardly looks big enough to fit one and yet they both eat, sleep, live in this tiny, made-of-poop hut. what?! how the heck are we so freakin’ lucky?!! that thought must’ve crossed my mind an infinite number of times during our stay.

the maize looks great and gladness is very proud of the harvest. we say our goodbyes and head back for breakfast. we pass another baobob tree. these things are wild to me, wait until I show you a photo. I tried the baobob seed candy they sell when I was in zanzibar, it is very odd, im bring some home for people to try. the baobob tree we passed had some strange wood hanging in it. turns out they hollow out a piece of a log and hang it in the tree so that bees come there and create a hive, then they can harvest honey. let me tell you, it is the best honey you will ever taste and we ate it on our chipati for the duration of our visit. we pass through a herd of cattle, they mosey across the bush, kicking up a cloud of dust as they go. they don’t seem to mind us and the maasai steer them directly into our path so that we are weaving through the herd as we head back to the main bomas.

we see more children, very young children, up far too early doing chores, and staring curiously at the strange wzungus walking outside their homes. im sure for many of them it is the first time they’ve seen a mzungu. we stare back, equally intrigued. they wear so little, and it is not warm here. I am in long pants and a fleece, and I’d say im fairly acclimated to cool weather after the spring we had in oregon before I left and then the cool winter weather we’ve had in arusha. these children are draped in worn cloth, small maasai blankets, usually with holes and so thin they’re practically transparent. they wear nothing under them, just as their parents do, but at least the women and men are usually draped in three of these cloths. the childrens’ single cloth flaps in the wind and their naked bodies are completely exposed to the elements. does make it very convenient to do your business in the bush, and we definitely passed a squatting child and gladness points at him and tells us he’s pooping. very classy. as you can probably tell, she’s not to the point at all ;) then she tried to convince us that we had to poop in the bush at least one time during our trip… not a chance. sorry gladness.

breakfast in the bush… now we toyed with this dilemma during the entire trip, and after clinic it became even more of an issue – the fact that they would feed us to excess, literally so much we couldn’t come close to finishing what the three female cooks prepared for each meal, and yet we heard about and saw the malnourished children constantly throughout the day. talk about a moral quandary! i’ll come back to this but here’s an example. for breakfast we were served roasted bananas (seriously one of these plantines prepared this way is enough to fill you), toast, banana fruit, omlette, and roasted peanuts with tea and coffee. we politely sampled everything, but by the end of the trip we were done with polite and pleading to give the children even a portion of what they had prepared for us. we would also ask that the leftovers from our breakfast just be saved and we’d eat that for lunch, but they refused, each meal was prepared from scratch with portions far greater than we could stuff in our faces. awesome.

we piled in the back of gladness’ truck and she drove like a maniac to the clinic a few minutes away. we unpacked all of the drugs into one room, our pharmacy, and a lot of the supplies. dr. lace and kurt were in that room seeing patients and distributing meds, the girls were in the next room seeing patients and prescribing meds. he really did just let us loose, and it was pretty awesome getting to see patients all on our own with gladness as our interpreter. of course we consulted with him and ran cases past him to be sure we weren’t missing anything, but for the most part we were in charge. it was a great way to brush up on physical exam skills. we listened to soooo many terrible lungs, did abdominal exams, musculoskeletal exams, listened to hearts, took temps and bp, did pre-natal exams, looked in lots of disgusting ears, and diagnosed more ringworm than we’d like to admit. pretty much every child was covered in fungus and thus treated for ringworm, and we gave mebendazole universally as well because most of the children hadn’t been dewormed in a year or more and they really try to do it once every six months. their swollen bellies were sure evidence of the parasites living inside.

the other prevalent issues were the obvious malnutrition. the children had the distended bellies and frail limbs. we saw one or two with rickets from severe vitamin deficiency. the problem is most of them are fed only porridge each day and we’re not sure how much. no meat, no eggs, little milk, and absolutely no veggies. talk about an utter lack of variety in the diet. how are children expected to grow and thrive on porridge?! they’re not, that’s pretty much the bottom line. we had brought a vitamin supplement liquid thing that is meant to be given each day, only a tablespoon, and we distributed it to every child that fit the malnutrition bill, and also to the pregnant women who came in complaining of being tired, who were severely anemic on exam, and had bellies substantially smaller than their stated delivery date would suggest. not surprisingly, we ran out on the second day of clinic. this just emphasized even more why the work gladness is doing is so important. the vegetable garden, among many other things, could greatly improve the lives of these children. equality between women and men would also make a great difference as generally the men are the only ones allotted meat to eat.

we saw 35 patients that day and prescribed three times that many meds. all of them were covered in dust and wearing tattered clothing so worn even the most impoverished cultures would discard them as rags. all heads are shaved, and eyebrows as well, mostly out of practicality. and every last one was just crawling with flies. the thing about it is when a fly lands on me I can’t help but immediately flick it off – I find flies to be the greatest annoyance. they tolerate a dozen flies crawling on their heads, sitting in the corners of their eyes and around their mouths. it makes me squirm just thinking about it, but I suppose it is a losing battle and there’s a point when you learn all you can do is learn to deal with it. the adults complain of aches and pains. what do you expect when you spend your days plowing fields, milking animals, building your hut, sitting over a fire, and all of this with a child strapped to your back, not to mention the dreadful ‘beds’ they sleep on. ibuprofen was our friend. mostly they just want the attention, they want to be touched, to be examined, and to be given something with the promise that it will help. we could offer this to them.

the children, aside from the parasites, ringworm, and malnutrition, suffered from the effects of living in tiny quarters with a constant fire and no chimney. the smoke takes a serious toll on the people here. I’ll describe later what it’s like to spend time in one of the huts, but for now I’ll just say that every single maasai who walked through our clinic door wreaked of smoke and had the red eyes, runny nose, and raspy lungs to prove it. all of the childrens’ eyes hurt, all of them had awful sounding coughs, and most had otitis media. the ear infections, the junky lungs, the irritated eyes, all are because their huts are constantly filled with smoke from the ever-burning fires in the tiny huts. chimneys would help a great deal, but part of the problem is that they don’t make the connection between their ailments and the smoke. also, building a chimney in and of itself poses a problem. it seems so simple to me, just make a hole in the hay you build the roof with and add a tube with a cover (for when it rains), but leave space for the smoke to come out. if some factory could come up with an easy plan to make this and distribute it the people here would greatly benefit, but as it is building chimneys are not a practical part of their house planning. the women are responsible for building the huts to attract a husband. if she does not maintain it properly, for instance, if rain gets inside, she will be beat. you can see why maybe a potentially leaky chimney is not worth the risk.

hmm, yet another culture where the women are expected to do absolutely everything and the men just sit around and socialize and drink kunyagi. it was just like this in the philippines, and it’s definitely like this in most of arusha and even in zanz. doesn’t quite make sense. let us take a moment to consider how it happens in the animal kingdom – birds are a great example. the males have to be bright and beautiful and build amazing nests to attract mates, makes sense to me :) here in lengasti the women build the home, they care for the children, they prepare the food, and the submit to the man always. we learned that the idea of foreplay does not exist. the man walks into the hut and demands sex. the woman has no choice in the matter, they make sex (as gladness says).

the talk of sex opens a box of worms when it comes to the maasai culture. for one thing, the idea of circumcision is quite interesting. we’ll begin with male circumcision because it’s more socially acceptable, though I’m not sure how acceptable it is to gather up the boys when they’re 15, throw them in a river until they’re hypothermic (this is if they’re lucky, to help reduce the pain), then cut off their foreskin using the same knife without washing between boys. they also leave a flap of skin they call the patrol, and gladness couldn’t quite explain the purpose of this. once the boys are circumcised they go sit in a hut for a few months, then they become a maasai warrior (we aren’t really clear on the logistics of this, but I think it is less relevant these days because no longer being nomadic means they don’t need to warrior much if you know what I mean), take a wife, and get 5 acres of land. simple as that. more wives equals more land. I tried to convince gladness they should change the rule so that the fewer wives and children you have the more land you get. she wasn’t convinced that would fly.

oh, did I not mention the multiple wives thing yet? yes, just so that we’re clear, the maasai are down with polygamy – at least the men are, I’m sure the woman would have something say on the matter were they allowed to speak their mind without fear of being beat. men often have about five wives, and twenty plus children as a result. but fear not! if a man happens to get bored with one or all of this multiple wives, he is perfectly allowed to demand another woman sleep with him, another man’s wife, it is no problem. just like so many things here – it’s no problem. riiighhhtt… fortunately, they’re not so big on paternity tests here, and since the men sleep around so much, when a child is born it’s kind of like everyone is the father. awesome, that many more men to potentially get a beating from.

if that’s not difficult enough to wrap your mind around, if you’re open-minded to the idea of these practices happening today, I’ve got more for you. female circumcision, more appropriately called genital mutilation, is a practice that gladness is fighting to stop, but sadly it’s still happening today. the sole purpose of circumcising the clitoris is so that women find absolutely no pleasure in sex. the goal is to prevent the women from sleeping around. how messed up is that?! I mean, let’s be honest, in a culture where the men are allowed to sleep around as much as they want they go to great lengths to circumcise the women at age 12 or 13 (just before they marry), which usually results in the death of at least one of the girls. same idea, stick all the girls in a hut, same knife circumcises them all, and the families actually pay the people who perform the circumcisions. #&*$ that!! gladness said her daughter elected not to be circumcised and she supported her, though her husband (who I think still lives when them but they’re not married anymore) didn’t really approve. go gladness!

here’s another fun fact: they’ve been doing a lot of work to encourage the use of condoms. we were going to hold a seminar on this during our time in lengasti but there were some unexpected obstacles – ill get to that later. the main thing is that you have to convince the men to use the condoms because if a woman were to ask her husband to use the condom she would be beat. did I mention that all of the men carry around their thick, wooden maasai warrior sticks. they use them to herd the animals, they lean on them when they’re standing around being lazy, the use them as walking sticks, and, oh, that’s right, they beat the women and children with them. how convenient to always carry a beating stick around with you.

so the thing is, I’m painting the men in such a negative way, but I don’t hate them. this is their culture, it is all they know. how much can you blame them? and it is obvious that in this particularly tribe they are making efforts to change. Unfortunately, I have just read the book ‘the girl with the dragon tattoo’ (original title: men who hate women) and it is a book about just that. it really makes you despise the male gender, and then to find myself in a culture where I could so easily relate the oppression of the women to the terrible events in the book… maybe not the best combo. it is good that we met a number of nice men during our time and of course we had dr. lace doing great things, and kurt being such a good sport, all redeeming the y chromosome. plus my dad is pretty much the most awesome guy ever, and he’s male, so fear not! I’m no man-hater :) though I do like the maasai women much more, I feel a greater connection and sympathy toward them (for obvious reasons), but the men are not all bad. again, it is how they were taught, they do not know otherwise, and I’m sure, were they to see the way our culture works, they’d find equally odd and unacceptable things.