First Blood, First Boma, First Phonebook

Our blood refrigerator has it's first parcel. Sizya, a lab tech, got poked today so that we can be ready for a possible delivery. I'm next up on the donor list apparently.

Last week, Heba, a volunteer nurse practitioner, asked if it would be possible to visit a traditional Maasai village. She said she had seen a lot of interesting pathologies in our Maasai patients, and she was hoping a better idea of their home life would shed some light as to why.

The problem is that all of my Maasai friends live in Ngorongoro, which is a horrifically expensive place to visit if you aren't an East African citizen, which I'm not. It comes out to the tune of $300 per person per day. So I asked around a bit and in the end, Coleman, a member of the FAME staff invited us to visit his village close to Monduli, which is outside of Ngorongoro. The date was set for the next Tuesday.

We briefly considered delaying when I was hospitalized Sunday night for a suspected kidney stone, but I felt fine the next day, so we decided to go anyway.

Coleman's village was about an hour and a half drive from FAME. We started out on the paved highway, turned off onto a partially paved road, transitioned to a gravel road then a two track dirt road, then a one track dirt road, then no road at all, driving cross-country. Fortunately, our Toyota RAV4 is made of sterner stuff, and tackled the rocky terrain like a champ.

A Maasai village is generally called a boma, which refers to the thorny enclosure that surrounds it to keep the cattle in and the predators out. Coleman's boma had four houses, all made of mud and dung over woven sticks with thatched roofs. One house for his head wife her children, one for the second wife and her children, one for cooking, and one for storage. There were also two internal enclosures: one for cattle and one for goats. The RAV4 looked a little out of place, like a spaceship that had just landed there.

The houses were quite beautiful up close. The mud walls were smooth like driftwood. It was very dark inside because the only opening is the door, which serves as entrance, light source and chimney all at once. Coleman's first wife offered us tea. The Maasai idea of tea is fresh boiled milk with lots of sugar, waved in the general direction of a tea plantation and then drunk as is. Conversation stopped as everyone sat around slurping. Then Heba brought out one of the gifts she brought: two big jars of colorful gumballs. They turned out to tremendously popular. Coleman officiously took on the role of gumball distributer, and soon the sounds of slurping tea were replaced with smacking lips as the gum made the rounds.

Then we had a tour of the whole place. The second wife's house in particular was interesting because she had decorated it with all sorts of things, from medication packaging to Christmas tree tinsel. Anything bright, shiny or colorful had been saved and carefully tied to the rafters to liven up the decor.

We also walked around to visit some neighboring bomas, where they apologized for not having tea because there was no water.

Walking back to Coleman's house, we heard a rumbling sound, and it became apparent why he had wanted to come on Tuesday. It was the one day of the month that the four-wheel-drive lorry came around to sell corn, and he wanted to be there to personally oversee the negotiations, which took about half an hour.

Then we had a sumptuous meal of roast goat. I think the Maasai recipe is the best. There are only two ingredients: meat and fire. I also tried a kind of mashed corn floating in water that you drink out of a gourd. I may regret that particular decision in a few days, since I doubt the water was boiled beforehand.

We exchanged more gifts. We had brought shukas (a sort of plaid blanket) for the elders, and we received jewelry for Heba and a decorated club for me. Finally, we took some pictures together and then said goodbye. It seemed like everyone from a four mile radius came to see us off. It turned out we were the first foreign visitors to that particular community, or at least the first that anyone could remember.

Hopefully I will be able to steal some pictures from Heba's phone, since I didn't take very many.

BONUS FUN FIND

I was at a school office today, and I saw a phonebook, the first I'd seen in Tanzania. It turns out it wasn't a Karatu phonebook, but rather the directory for the entire country of Tanzania. Not a whole lot of landlines here. It was less than two inches thick.