Today we visited a Maasai village, it was certainly an experience! Our guide arrange for us to pay around $10USD each to the village chief and then we were invited into the village to meet everyone and take photos and video. The Maasai are very striking looking, very dark black skinned, and they often wear bright red 'kangas' (blankets) which they reckon keep the lions away. Plus heaps of beautiful jewellery, bead necklaces, bracelets, earrings (they notch their ears and have huge holes in the lobes). They tend goats and cattle, this is what they do all day - the children do it as well (if they're not in school). They basically walk around all day with the herd to make sure they have food to eat, and water to drink. Their animals are everything to them: they are considered 'rich' and 'wealthy' if they have lots of healthy animals.The village is surrounded by sticks and twigs making a strong fence to contain the village, and keep out wild animals. The villagers keep their cattle inside at night, this means that the whole area is based on cow dung. Lots and lots of cow dung. Luckily for Shane, he was wearing boots. Mum and I were wearing sandals...... we enjoyed a hot shower with copious amounts of soap later that day though...
The boys showed Shane how to light a fire without matches, using hard and soft wood and dried....you guessed it....cow dung. This is 'The Man's Job' every morning. After he lights the fire, the women from each hut come and get some fire to light their own fires inside their huts. The huts are made of twigs, branches, and....yes....cow dung! (they love the stuff! it's very useful!) and they are quite spacious inside, even though they look small. You have to hunch over to enter them and they generally have several separate rooms inside: first, an entrance way, then a small area for the woman (and husband, if he is there), they sleep on animal hides on the floor. Sometimes there is a small area for a goat (so they can milk it first thing in the morning) and then another room for the kids. This is a polygamous society, the men are allowed as many wives as they wish, and they take advantage of this, as you would, I suppose! if you were a man, that is..... anyway, the man gets to choose where he sleeps every night.
Another thing I noticed: the whole village looks after the children as a group, it's not just left up to the individual parents to do all the work. Actually, the whole village works as a community, they have few material possessions and all the money they earn (from selling jewellery etc) goes to benefit the whole village, not just the single person. The Maasai have overcome so much, and yet they remain relatively 'untouched' by Western culture. They are not drunks, they don't smoke, they don't eat junk food. They survive mainly on goat blood, milk and meat. They don't eat any 'bush' type food.
We noticed their awesome sandals; made entirely of car tires, except for a few tiny nails holding the soles together. They also seem to like wrist watches, especially the digital kind (although I don't think they know how to tell time, most watches I saw them with didn't even work). The children adored my video camera, because I could film them and then play it back on the screen, they couldn't get enough of that! This society is a big believer in circumcision, both for boys and girls. However, with the boys it is a big celebration and a festival atmosphere, the circumcision is done in front of the whole village with much frivolity and whatnot; whereas the girls are circumcised in their individual family huts, only the family attending. Hmmmmmm....what does this mean? well, in this society, men are KING and women are second class - even though they do most of the work. (Just like western society, haha). The Maasai do send their kids to school, although it it difficult for them because often they have to send the kids away to boarding school, which they have to pay for, not to mention books, school supplies and uniforms.
This is a semi-nomadic society: they stay in one place for about 8 years, that's when the pile of cow dung in the village gets too high, they've got to move on!!! (no, I'm serious!)
I also noticed their ears: they 'notch' them, cut them with a sharp stone or a sharp knife, for decoration. Their jewellery is really beautiful and they are a very proud and majestic people. What a incredibly humbling experience - you couldn't learn anything about this in school, that's for sure.
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They don't actually cook anything. They milk the goats, just like cows I guess, but to get the blood, they hack into some major artery in the goat's neck, and 'bleed' the goat for a while. They rotate the goats to give them some time to recover from this. They fix up the cut with some sort of bush herbs. They drink the fresh blood by itself, and sometimes they mix the blood and the milk. This is their major form of food. Occasionally they will eat the meat, but that involves killing the goats, which they don't do very often - the blood and milk is too valuable.
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