Saturday afternoon...just got back from the most amazing thing...every week,hundreds of Masai people bring cattle and goats from their villages to a hilltop about 15 kil outside of Handeni..where they barter and sell their livestock, the atmosphere is electric with animals, Masai, African people moving around, checking out and bartering, at another area goats and cows are being slaughtered, i didn't go there, and justnext to that...fires are built with pieces of animal skewered with sharp wooden poles and driven into the ground, all around the fire...to be roasted for selling and eating in mud huts with thatched roofs a bit of a walk away..women from the Masai tribes are selling jewellery, so of course i bought a few pieces hanging around my neck now targetting me as a REAL TOURIST. No one else buys these things of course but us, and there are no other whites around, so i am flooded with attention...they even let me take pictures...usually they don't, convinced that we whites are taking the pics back to Europe and making a lot of money off them, which most probably they are..the Masai tribe is tall, lanky and beautiful, wearing flowing red and magenta robes of fabric drapped elegantly around their very high tall lanky forms....their ear lobes sport huge holes, as big as silver dollars..with earings of giraffe hair, mirror and white beading....the same wrapped around their necks..the arms and calves bedecked in silver and copper rings, many many of them, circling around the body, rubber tire sandles, sometimes, othertimes drinking coca cola, on cell phones wearing western sandles...like me...
I am entranced by them. Ihave just finished reading The White Masai..fabulously interesting if you have a bent towards anthropology...a white German woman, Corrine Hofmann...who met and married a Masai 15 years ago...living in the wilds of Kenya with him, and customs...they have made a movie of it...she returned 14 years later..having fled with her daughter to save her life....and wrote about that too... I was approached by an older Masai...with 4 wives wanting to come to Canada with me...i spoke of the perils of snowfall...and he would have to sell his over 100 cattle to pay for the ticket..he declined, mostly afraid of snow, i assuring him i was afraid here of lions, tigers and bears...
Yesterday the Aids day....a huge parade of over 300 secondary school kids...for a couple of hours, we following..finishing in a shaded glen, with school chanting, a skit about HIV Aid...done amazingly...songs, poems...of course i have pics but no way to show them to you! the World Vision director here, delivered an empassioned dynamic speech for about half an hour to these kids, it was electric...huge...they were mesmerized by him...afterwards i was asked to speak, i told them that even not speaking Swahili..i was certain that what he was imparting was of supreme importance that they should take heed....that in Canada the big topic around Aids is SAFE SEX..that they MUST be careful..that their lives were at stake..etc. etc...
Afterwards i understand that he was talking mainly about ABSTINANCE....and how hard that can be when someone has already experienced the glory of sex..but how important it is...and here i was going on about safe sex....Walking home a young man rushed up to me, in his grey pants and white shirt from the school, speaking English confessing that he had had sex..and how was he to stop doing it...?? my director cut in and told him to keep busy at all costs..this is a problem not only here but everywhere....
At the end we agreed that abstinance would surely solve the problem, but for many kids it is out of the question, and good education re condoms etc...is needed...
the church playing a big part here, i see...
Am not getting all my emails through, i am seeing...many are writing that they have sent me information i have not received..sorry...i am getting about 13 everytime i open up when i can..but apparantly lots aren't going through, so please bear with me...send them again, i would say..love hearing from you...
On Monday i will be 'interviewing' people from the Aids Organization i spoke about the other day..with stories...i am asking them to email anyone who send donations tell you directly exactly where your money is going..i am comfortable with that...
also my paint is arriving from Dar Es Salaam...with Doris our Tanzania director...she has had to buy four litres per colour...way more than i can use, but need it for the workshops..she comes in tonight, will be great meeting and talking with her...
have a great weekend...talk soon...hugs Lynn