HAPPY VALENTINES DAY!!
hI! wishing you all a great loving day!!...just hitched a ride up the mountain to Kiratu this morning with a guy from Norway and his driver who is taking him into the Safari routes with a camera to bring home pictures for his travel agency - we ran into a huge tribe of baboons loping along all over the road, big huge ones, babies, families making their way from one side to the other...Cows, goat, people on bikes, foot, wagons, everything along these roads, beautiful red sand, green lush trees interspersed here and there, on each side as we wide our way up.. it's been raining hard everyday now, the Big Rains have come,which is great to ward off pending drought, rains which beat down hard for about an hour and then run away, leaving once again blue skies and lots of sun. gorgeous..
Been incredibly busy, couldn't get through the blog network to write last week, so I sent Ted a big long email to copy into my blog, but i don't think he was able to, such is the frustration! will try to remember it all..
Where to begin???
Maybe starting from now and moving backwards..just finished a three day workshop in Mto Wa Mbu, with Charles facilitating 20 Masai leaders,chiefs, plus government people from tribal villages, Muslim govt reps, plus Afrikan, it was an incredible group of people - all leaders in their communities coming together to understand in detail the Hiv Aids crisis, for the very first time. Up until now, Charles has been training youth leaders, students, but never has he worked with elected official before in an official group such as this. About 20 people, some dressed in Masai traditional clothing, mostly men, maybe 5 women, sitting in a large U learning about every aspect of the Hiv Aids crisis: what causes Hiv Aids? protection, all about condoms, volunteer testing, and finally councelling....traditional tribal taboos, beliefs, sexual conduct which abounds rampantly in the Masai communities starting from a very young age, so much to talk about, where to begin. Masai people don't think they can contact Hiv aids, although many of their community have died from it...they believe simply that they have been bewitched. They try to cure the disease with Masai traditional remedies, which work for most other diseases, and which can cure some of the repercussions of Hiv Aids: pneumonia, bronchitis, tb, bleeding etc. - but never the virus. They do cure these outside diseases, but only for awhile, then they come back, and often with a horrible vengence, much worse than before. The discussions were lively, filled with laughter, lots of questions, answers. It is a huge challenge,working with this kind of a community who for thousands of years have been practicing a sexual form of expression reaching all aspects of their customs: interlaced into every celebration, from warrior play, from infertility solutions, from multiple wives and partners, from the practice of widows being passed along to her husband's brothers....The mark of a successful Masai man is the number of cows and goats he has. The more livestock, the more wives he needs to look after them, the more children she needs to help with the chores, and on it goes. Masai warriors, men called Morans ranging in age from 12 up to about 25 spend their days buying selling, auctioning the livestock, protecting the bomas, the villages and playing with the girls. When they do get married, wives are shared..as long as the men are of the same agement as the husband, or, in other words, that the men have had their circumcism ceremony at the same time. After the wedding night another from the agement group can feel free to come by the wife's hut, stab his spear into the ground outside to show that he is inside, and go about his business. If the husband comes along he must cough discretely to let them know he is in the vicinity and move along.

Obviously, this sharing of women is a huge problem with the spreading of Hiv Aids. and one that will be very difficult for the Masai culture to shift, or convince their members to change. In addition, babies are born without hygiene, water, anescetic or gloves; circumcism ceremonies are performed with hundreds of young men, with the same blade, without hygiene. For three days, every detail was discussed in Swahili, with lots of questions, answers, laughing, disbelief, intensity. The most shocking part of the agenda was when a wooden phallic penis was brought out and set on the table in front of the head chief of the meeting, a huge man, draped in blue and red checked sheets perched on two white plastic chairs set together to hold his great girth. He couldn't believe his eyes! Then the tribal woman next to him stood up and pulled a condom onto it, showing them how to use it probably for the first time! Oh my gawd! I can't describe the look on their faces - the laughter, the embarassment, the hoots and then the hiding their heads in their hands, it was incredible to witness...I had filmed the whole meeting, and have this on tape as well. It was a moment i won't forget!

Charles brought in a man living with Hiv Aids positive on the medicine Arvs. This brought a solemn seriousness to the group, wide eyed, listening, actually to have someone standing strongly in front of them talking so openly about this disease, about how he contacted it, about how the ARVs are helping him, listening intently to him about his experience, his advice on how to prevent..the importance of going into their communities as leaders, to being tested and to teaching their people of this disease - to use the dreaded condoms.
It was a very successful hugely informative meeting...
And now it is up to the leaders to take this information back into their lives...will they do this?
Masai are known for agreeing, smiling, learning, understanding and then going back to their communities and deciding amongst themselves to disregard everything, to not go along with anything they have heard.. But this time Charles has posted a few close friends within the community to stand up and agree with this new information the chiefs will bring in...to push it along, to help bring it into fruition, so we shall see....
Last week three women from the states arrived, representatives from Rotary, to witness for themselves some of the Hiv Aids and water projects bring done in these parts. We took them out to two Masai villages and met with the Hiv aids community groups..sitting in a grove of trees in the middle of a forest on four benches facing each other, men and women, young and old, talking about hiv aids...Charles had trained them a few months ago. These people are pioneers in this work, brave to be out there talking and teaching about this disease, bypassing the stigma of it, and pushing forth, traveling by foot from one mud hut to the next, talking with families together about the disease, spreading the word...speaking about their difficulties not being able to reach bomas so far away, where it would take sometimes a day and a half to walk there, to talk, and then to come back....the women left $700. which we agreed would be used to buy bicycles for these people, and a camera to record their work. We were celebrated later with the leg of a goat, roasted and slung onto a spear stuck into the ground into the centre of a lovely wreath of green leaves. A Masai pulled out his long sharp sword hidden beneath the folds of his dress, and sliced the goat meat into small pieces offering each one to us, round and round until it was finished. Delicious. On the way out, we saw a herd of giraffe in the distance, over fifty of them together, moving slowly along the horizon, one after the next in a line, their long graceful necks, heads facing the same direction, unusual, converging for a meeting of sorts?...zebra, Thompson gizelles in groups along the road across tundra, a wide gorgeous sunset....the end of yet another great day....oh yes I love it here....
I mentioned the camera a while back, well Jim and Lindsey and the wonderful Mark from Henry's downtown used camera outlet...i need to tell you that all is working well and wonderfully, amazingly. I am definately technophobic, and with all this new equipment it has had me in a state of suspended agitation, putting it out of my mind as much as possible, all the while keeping the thing in its big black too falshy bag, the tell tale tripod at its side...hidden behind a curtain in my room with the black suitcase wedged in front of it...But with that workshop, i had to bring it out. there are sixteen pieces of equipment i have to worry about, and have to remember what goes where, and what for. It is not easy for me. But i have to say that it worked. And once up and in operation, the camera securely attached to the tripod, i am able to slowly move it about, up and down, back and forth, and although Lindsey said that to zoom in was passe and a bit amateurish, face it, i am an amateur, no getting around it, so zoom i did, and do. It is exciting to learn something so new to me...and one of the exciting thing about being in Africa. The need to force yourself to stretch, and learn, and try to be open, to understand, to figure out dialects, to ask questions sometimes over and over until the answers come clear. It is a stretch, believe me. Physically I am okay, I was sick with flu the whole first week, during a lot of those field visits, meetings, but was told by a doctor to keep going, to drink lots of water and let it pass through, not easy but necessary...doctor's orders...
am feeling much better now, lots of yoga, in fact i did a couple of sessions during the workshop described above. got them to stand up push their chairs away, and did a lot of work around the shoulders, arms, legs. They loved it...I am also called upon to give my ideas about some of the things being discussed: condoms was a big topic, they were not in any way interested in using these things...I told them that neither were we! Neither is anyone, but when it is necessary it must be done...I am going to move onto another post, there is a scary signal here which says the blog cannot be conected to the post, pray!!