Ok hi! well, i have had the pleasure of receiving nary an email from not even a single soul but for two junk messages from persons of whom I know not for over two weeks now.. is Sympatico down? Ah..well I shall still soldier on with this blog, writing stories and ideas to whomever again of whom I know not.
Life gallops along...we are hugely busy everyday, last week two full two day workshops for me, two half day ones for Lindsey....my second was the actualization of a dream for me, to work in a Masai village with Masai warriors, women and youth, Friday and Saturday...we were combining with ICA running Hiv aids education sessions, headed out over intrepid terrain, scruffy dirt tundra, high grasses, stunning mountains, rivers, huge vistas... to the right front tire giving out, causing our arrival to be three hours late - participants waiting, anxious for lunch, no, lunch money, unbeknownced to me, so we set up our materials in a classroom in the public school and rounded up two chipatis each per student plus a coke, eaten on the dusty ground under a ring of trees..and started the workshop over three hours late, hurling into exercise after exercise, spirit cards, graduated skies and big land little sky. By three thirty they were exhausted and becoming relatively hostile having been told only that morning about the workshop, having shut down whatever means they had to make dinner money that day, and now realizing that they were not being paid to attend this workshop....we let them go early and dragged ourselves back across dusty holey tundra to Mto Waa Mbu...Barrie who is the financial man for ICA here filling in as my interpreter declaring all the way home that "they are hopeless", that he wanted to kill himself!!It was a challenge, and not one I cared to repeat day two, but Saturday morning bright and early we set out only to realize we had forgotten some things, turned back and again arrived three hours late....
We paid them lunch money this time.
Funny how sometimes you expect something to be fabulous, you imagine the ultimate, when in fact events leading up to it far surpass the ultimate expectation. How life is.
But on our way back we paid a visit to the local Masai chief's doma....perched high into glorious rolling hills with vista of mountains, valleys, open meadows, clusters of cows with young Masai in red and purple here and there, goats running in little herds, we drove off the main road across tundra....He with his brothers, their Masai sheets blowing in a soft wind, their spears and staffs silouetted against the sunsetting sky standing against a backdrop of mud huts and thorn stick corals, ...his father a ninety two year old ancient elder sitting on his special wooden stool a metal cylinder of tobacco snuff at his lap, we were told how to greet him. I have been learning Masai lately, this Chief becoming a friend, the practice of greeting done in accordance with age and gender, confusing at best - sometimes not being able to guess age, whether a young boy has been circumcized and therefore has graduated into the MORAN or warrior bracket, or whether the elder I am meeting and greeting as a woman is in fact a gentleman...
Hello to the father, the matriarch of this huge family, having had twelve wives and over 60 children, our chief with only two wives, five kids, but brothers, sisters, wives and husbands, many children, goats, chickens and flies all living together in some kind of peaceful arrangement atop this mountain of God's indescrible paradise.
I attempted to milk a goat with his first wife with a child holding its head still while we crouched down at its behind and tried to hang onto a long teet, yanking and pulling it, with it leaping out of the clutch of my fingers each time.
.....to be continued...