My Time With The Maasai

So I've been having a hell of a time trying to just upload the photos I took while I was in Zac's village, but now I've finally succeeded.
Zac, his brother, and I got on a bus from Moshi to Arusha and then another from Arusha to I forget where but it was headed towards the Serengeti. The bus to Arusha was extremely crowded and hot. There was a baby sitting next to me who kept on wanting to drink from my water bottle. She was an adorable baby, but I needed all the water I had for my time in the village plus her mother had a water bottle for her, it's just that her mother wasn't paying any attention to her.
When we disembarked from our second bus we then set out on an hour walk to Zac's village, it was literally in the middle of the dessert. The sun was setting by the time that we got to the village. One of the warriors handed out the notebooks, pens, and candies I had brought as gifts for the children. Then Zac and his brother and I walked over to a nearby Babao tree. While we were there we climbed these sticks that were stuck in the trunk of a tree like a ladder because the Maasai harvest the fruits from the tree, plus we saw a herd of zebra.When we returned to the village Zac's mother cooked rice for us. The sauce she put on it was delicious but apparently it was just a bunch of stuff she had randomly thrown together. The downside was the amount of rice they gave, I know it was a gesture of generosity but they gave me something close to a half gallon bowl filled up to the top with rice and I always felt I was being rude when I couldn't possibly finish it all. Maasai huts are especially good at containing the heat within them, which makes things uncomfortable since food is made over an open fire in the middle of the hut. After dinner and many cups of chai we went to sleep. A Maasai bed is made of sticks and goat skin and I shared my bed with Zac, his brother, and his half brother of whom the hut belonged to. The hut was pretty warm and the bed pretty hard, but thing that made sleeping difficult for me was the lack of space. Many times I'd be able to drift of to sleep only to be shoved into the wall of the hut by someone else shifting in their sleep.






The next day, to most of the village's happy surprise, I dressed in Maasai clothing. We then spent the day watching after some of the village's animals as they were out grazing. I thought this meant a day of chilling out under a tree, but because the rains haven't really come yet it's still very dry and so we had to walk for something like three hours to get to where the animals were.
Once we came to the herd we slept under a tree for a while. The feeling was very peaceful, it was so quiet out there in the African wild and it was a welcome relief from all of the walking. Walking back we saw giraffes, impala, ostriches, and more zebra. We stopped under another Babao tree, which is where I ran out of water. By the time we got a village that could give us some water I was feeling pretty dehydrated and so I drank the water they gave me without caring about not having put a purification tablet in it. The way I saw it , it was better to get a stomach flu than pass out of heat exhaustion in the middle of the bush.


When we got back we ate a goat and I drank some of its blood. Pictures of that have been omitted for the sake of my vegetarian readers.
In Zac's village there is a home that his father is building from bricks, his father wants a "mzungu home" and this is where we prepared and ate the meat. Women aren't allowed to see the preparation, cooking, or eating of meat because Maasai men feel that meat gives them strength and in order to gain this strength women must have nothing to do with it. So as we skinned the goat and cut off pieces to eat we put up sheets over the windows so the women couldn't see. It became difficult to keep the sheets up because soon after we started it became very windy. Whenever a sheet was blown off the men and I would scramble to put it back up, it reminded me of when you're little and doing something with "no girls allowed." What ever game you're playing becomes your second priority with you're first being ensuring that girls have nothing to do with it.
To a certain degree it can be said that it's sexist to not involve women in the eating of meat, but to what degree do you also need to respect the Maasai culture? The Maasai practice female circumcision, something I could never support, but also I slightly understood the want to eat meat away from women. It's unfair to label women as toxic or someone who will ruin what men want to do, but there's something about sitting around the fire with men, eating meat with a machete that really does make you feel stronger. It all felt very ancient to me, like eating the goat that night sent me back thousands of years.
The Maasai also drink the blood of the animals they eat. In order to preserve the blood Maasai will suffocate the animal instead of slitting its throat. Neither way is exactly humane or a way that I would want to go, but for some reason it felt better that they didn't slit the goat's throat. As I'm sure you're all dying to hear, yes I did drink goats blood and no it didn't make me the slightest bit sick, but I did gag when a little piece of liver went into my mouth while I was drinking the blood. In case you were wondering, blood tastes kinda like if you had bleeding gums and a mouth full of phlegm and then swallowed it.
After we ate the meat the left over parts were put into a stew. This includes the head which they roasted to get the hairs off of before putting in the big pot. The stew was for the young boys who were also tending to the fire. As the pot boiled Zac and I sat back and talked the night away. First he told me how his village is his father, his father's wives, their children, and the children's wives and children; so nearly everyone in the village was related to Zac. Zac was very interested in the Amazon forest because he had read about it once in a book, he asked me if the Amazon was in California, I told him no, that it was much further south. That might sound rediculous to you, but how many of you would be able to name which contries had which African landmarks. This then led to me telling Zac about various ancient cultures across the world and their similarities to the Maasai. This all took place by the dim light of the fire, with the wind blowing all around us, and dry lightning striking frequently as it does out in the bush.
After this whole experience I can without a doubt say that I'm glad that I did it, but also that I don't think I want to do it again. I learned a great deal about what life is like for a Maasai and it made me value a lot more of my western comforts. The sights of the open African desert were breath taking and something that can never fully be described in words. I came back from my time with the Maasai a different man.