In Which I Learn of Cows and Lions - Introducing My Village and IL MAASAI

Now, let me introduce my new village home: Loolera (the second ‘L’ is somewhere between an ‘L’-sound and an ‘R’-sound, and the ‘R’ is slightly rolled).

My arrival in the village was fittingly dramatic, at least for someone with American eyes. On the night of my arrival, I learned that a small pride of lions was in residence around the nearby mountain, and had just recently killed a cow. Similarly, the following morning, I woke to find a sick donkey hiding on my porch, which bore the marks of a recent hyena mauling. Welcome to "Wild Africa!" says my American mind!

Loolera is a small village located on the high Tanzanian central plateau, at the southern edge of the so-called Maasai Steppe - a vast, wild stretch of savannah and acacia thickets occupied almost solely by the famous (or infamous) Maasai people, semi-nomadic pastoralists who cling fiercely to their traditions and way of life, despite the modernization and development that has overtaken most of Tanzania.

Perhaps some of you have already heard of the Maasai – they are often portrayed as the “classic,” “true,” “wild,” Africans in popular media (alongside the !Kung “Bushmen” of the Kalahari, and others), in a perfect example of the enduring “Noble Savage” myth, carried over from the Colonial period. Yet such stereotyping is somewhat understandable: the Maasai are instantly recognizable, and hardly forgettable - particularly the young warrior-herders (il murran) with their scarlet cloaks, stout staves or spears, short swords and exquisite jewelry. The women are similarly striking, with bedecked with elaborate beadwork and numerous piercings. Most of Maasai eschew modern conveniences and education in favor of their precious cattle, land, and heritage.

They view themselves as distinct and separate from the rest of Tanzanian society - the Waswahili, as they call all the other tribes. Indeed, ethno-linguistic study seems to indicate that they come from the Nilotic peoples of North Sudan, not the Bantu people groups that now make up most of Tanzania. Their language, Maa, remains their primary tongue, and they avoid using Swahili whenever possible. Subsisting almost entirely on milk and meat, they look down on farming as livelihood, though in recent days some of them have begun to adopt a little farming on the side to supplement their diets. They disdain hunting, and perhaps this disdain has enabled them to live here alongside the great African megafauna for hundreds of years. They blame the Waswahili and Europeans for the recent disappearance of much of the big game. They will, however, hunt lions when the cats prey on their cattle; indeed, the greatest and most celebrated events in Maasai culture seem to be lion hunts… and wars. Almost all of the Maasai – at least in my district – are Christians (or at least nominally so).

These are my new neighbors and work partners, the primary inhabitants of Loolera village. For the next three months, I have no assignment other than to integrate with the Maasai, study the village of Loolera and its environs in a development context, and formulate a plan of action to help improve the public health situation. In my village, there is a primary school (often poorly attended, as the Maasai like to marry off their girls early and send the boys out to watch cattle), a Catholic mission (started by American missionaries who have long since left, seeming to have either ‘given up’ or who viewed their project as complete (it’s not)), and an understaffed health clinic. These are the pre-existing avenues for work available to me. Otherwise, there are couple shop-stalls (little shacks) and a couple “bars” (little shacks) at the center of the village. The vast majority of people live spread out on the surrounding plains, where each family-clan has their “boma”: a thorny enclosure to keep their cattle and goats at night, “safe” from the hyenas and lions (but lions can jump high!). During the day, the warrior-youth and uncircumcised boys take the livestock out to graze, the women and girls work at home, and the elders (men over 30) go to the “bars” to drink (a huge problem in this village!). A small proportion of the children actually go to school. As of now, this is my impression of the village situation – I’m sure it will evolve over time.

About 6 kilometers away, another Peace Corps volunteer from my class, Travis, is living in a different village with the Wanguu people, who are predominately Muslim, engaged in subsistence farming for their livelihood, and often in quarrels with the Maasai over land and water. We’re working together to understand the dynamics between the pastoralist Maasai and agriculturalist Wanguu.

This is my new home. Right now, every day is a struggle to learn how to live alone without modern conveniences, to learn how to live comfortably in a new culture (a profoundly uncomfortable experience, for me, as I think it is for most people), to learn new languages (Kiswahili and Maa), and to better understand why God sent me here. Procuring food is difficult (Maasai don’t like fruit or veggies all that much, nor chickens/eggs, and they don’t sell much milk or meat – presumably because it's assumed that everybody has herds of their own). The simplest task, such as boiling water, is incredibly time-consuming (lighting up a fire or charcoal), and to procure basic supplies I have to walk 5 kilometers through bush to Travis' village. Every day has its adventure, and its many inconveniences. But of course, as GK Chesterton said, "an inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly conceived." The Maasai are very gracious, the scenery is gorgeous, I'm getting plenty of exercise, and I'm finding plenty of time to read and write (by lamplight).

As much as I miss home, and all that home entails, I like life here too.

The Poor, hyena-mauled, donkey

 My House

 Mt. Loolera

 Bush around Loolera

 A Maasai Murrani, warrior-herder

Inside my house

In Which I Learn the Swahilis - Pre-Service Training

Well, I suppose it's about time I write a full-length update for those of you interested in my little stint here in Tanzania. It's been about three months since I departed the United States, though it certainly feels like quite a bit longer! And with somewhere between 21 and 24 months left to go, the rather surprising duration and gravity of my term of service begins to hit me. I knew what I was getting into, of course, but I wasn't quite able to fathom what two years away from home would actually feel like, in my bones. Well, it's something, I tell you.

Let my begin by providing a brief synopsis of what occurred during the 2.5 months of my pre-Service training (as a Peace Corps Trainee), and then, in another post, I'll try to paint a sort of portrait of my new home, the village of Loolera in Kiteto District, Manyara Region, Tanzania.

Leaving New York City during a February deep freeze and debarking from the plane a day later in the humid, sweltering chaos of Dar es Salaam was the rough transition our group of 36 (now 34) trainees had arriving in Tanzania. We stayed for a week at a church-run hostel just outside the metropolis, getting vaccinations, medical and security briefings, learning "survival" Swahili, tasting the street life of “Dar,” and preparing for the move to our long-term training site in Tanga District, in the northeast of the country. That first week was pretty laid back, made somewhat arduous only by the change in climate and the first wave of illnesses that beset about half of us, only days after arrival. But we had (cold) showers, western toilets, ceiling fans, and all the government red-tape one could ask for, and frankly most of us were looking forward to getting out into the village, the "real deal."

We went up to Tanga exactly one week after our arrival in Tanzania. There we stayed for ten weeks, living with host families in small villages near the "scrappy junction town" of Muheza, receiving daily lessons in Kiswahili (the national language of Tanzania), Tanzanian culture, and health/environment development work in-country. Most class days were spent in small groups of 4-6 people who were living in the same village; once or twice a week the whole class of 34 would meet up at an agricultural training center for lectures and technical training. The rest of our time was spent either with our host families or exploring the country around our training site.

Living with host families was perhaps our biggest challenge - even greater than dealing with scorpions, spiders, and bats in our drop toilets; rats in our beds; bushbabies holding dance parties on our roofs at night; and the expected gastrointestinal problems. Our families were enormously protective, treated us like children, and seemed to think that their sole purpose in life was to make sure we gained twenty pounds by the end of training. They stuffed us with piles of ugali (corn mush), beans, rice, and week-old fish. Language and communication was also difficult - they knew next to no English, and we knew next to no Swahili. Nevertheless, by the end of training I was able to converse with my host parents about topics ranging from Al-Shabaab in Kenya to the monkeys destroying the family corn patch.

Despite some of these challenges, training was overall a fantastic experience, my host family was wonderful, and I learned plenty – especially language: the Peace Corps method of "total immersion" language acquisition is painful, but effective. We had several adventures exploring Tanga City and Muheza town, climbing in the Usambara Mountains, and swimming in the Indian Ocean. Although the culture was quite conservative in terms of dress and appearance, we were surprised by the leniency and relaxed nature of a predominately Islamic culture, and by the apparent lack of animosity between the Muslim majority and Christian minority. (This makes the ongoing approach of Al-Shabaab from the north much less of a threat, though a more tragic one, should it ever take hold in Tanzania). We were also exposed to some of the more painful realities of life in rural Tanzania - the dreadful condition of the district hospital (where for some reasons about 50,000 fruit bats roosted every day), the dangers of snakebite (my neighbor's wife was killed by a snake my second week of training), the ever-present threat of malaria, and the near daily announcement of a village death.

Following a slew of technical and language assessments, we finally returned to Dar and were sworn in as Peace Corps Volunteers of the United States at the U.S. Embassy on April 24, 2014. The very next day, we all began our respective journeys to our village work-sites, scattered all throughout Tanzania – our homes for the next two years.