JAMBO!!
The dreaded fly infested sojourn inside the Masai boma of course turns into one of the most incredibly memorable experiences i have ever had in my whole life! We drive up into the boma high upon rolling green hills in the middle of the most beautiful country on the planet with an awesome vista of 360 degrees, with mountains surrounding on all sides, Masai warriors, the chief, a parade of women and children coming out to meet us, the Chief's father, a very old man with a wrinkly face, rheumy black eyes sparkling - has 8 wives still living on the boma, each one the mistress of her own hut and ample supply of goats. Once a chief, having passed this honour on to his son, he is sitting on a plastic chair under a huge old acacia tree anticipating our arrival or more than likely eagerly awaiting the big bottle of Tanzanian scotch i have in my back pack. We assemble, Sierra the centre of attention, amidst flies, but not so many as I remember from last year - a nice breeze, the greeting of honour with the father first, Sierra her head bent low with a sort of bow, he touches the top of it and spits into her hair! With Seanna and i we shake hands with our OL PAYAN SUPAI, which means basically old man, how are you? in Masai - hello to everyone you must note as you greet the gender and agement of each person, from the very oldest right down to the little girls and little boys, ENDITOS and LAYONIS....we move en masse in through a small entranceway cut out of the thorn fence which surrounds the entire community protecting the fifty or so mud dung-mixed-with-ash huts woven intricately with large and small sticks of wood...each hut owned and built by the woman, the men visiting when the spirit moves..next, a time of giving presents to the chief and to his wife: art pencils, pens, paper, skipping ropes, vegetables for our dinner, rice, greens, tomatoes....theirs will be a mixture of freshly-taken goat's milk and blood, maybe some pieces of meet. We take our bags into the first wife's boma,a small round hut, clean and swept out for our visit, inside it is dark but for the tiny window just above the small and very short mud and dung hardened platform we are to sleep on that night. IT IS covered with a large piece of cowhide and set into a small cubicle, wall to wall bed so to speak. There is a mud floor, with another small half enclosed bed platform where the first wife and chief will slee. There are a few stones in the middle of the hut set in a cirle burning with left over embers of a fire. Next to our 'bed', there is a tiny sort of room with a small entranceway which we learn later will sleep 30 small goats less than a foot away from us during the night, a wall of dung and sticks between....The flies stay mainly outside.

A few days later....
HAPPY EASTER!!from Arusha town, Saturday afternoon,- Seanna and Sierra left last night,in great spirits. What an incredible experience they have had - each day filled with art projects with the orphanage, masai visits, the bomas, long walks through banana groves, safaris, rice, beans, chipatis, and chipsies, Fanta, Swahili..Sierra is studying Africa next term! Charles drove us all the way from Mto Wa mbu,a quick dinner at the BIG BITE the best Indian food in town, and to bed at the Arusha Naaz Hotel right across from the Patisserie Internet Cafe, where all the muzungas hang out, a few blocks down the street from KLM to change my flight home...

Where was I? The Masai boma....the sleepover....ah....once sort of settled we move outside the hut into the flies, there is no getting around it, bomas with cows and goats and donkeys have flies, and children with goat milk stuck on their faces, hands, attract them, millions of them...Sierra is drawing with a stick animals into the dry red ground between huts, 20 or thirty kids surrounding; the chief leads us out to greet at sunset the goats and cows as they are brought back to the boma from pastures, Masai warriors with long sticks and swords herding, the sun sinking, women with little metal cups squatting down for milking, a child holding the goat still at the other end. We try to milk, the teet slippery and thin, it keeps running away! I am getting NOTHING!! you hold it between your thumb and index finger at the top end and squeeze down very tightly, a bit dribbles out and on we go. Time for Sierra to choose her very own goat. Chief lost his cell phone a few weeks back, so in exchange I buy Sierra a goat...the one she chooses is white, a twin, a female and one which likely we are told will produce twins of her own within the year. My very own goat, named Lynn, white and black, has a baby boy goat called Connell running around under her for milk as she tries to dash away. The Masai don't count, they don't have the concept of counting in the way of their lives, but they do know each and every goat and cow, which has its own markings, family, personality and colourings. It is extraordinary that, when one goat goes missing out of a herd it is immediately missed, the warriors or young boys found responsible and reprehended...with someone sent out quickly to bring it home.
At night, the animals are lead inside the thorn fence into the huge circular boma area which is divided in sections by intricate fences made from long and short sticks of varying widths woven together. Each male who has his own wife, or a number of wives depending on how many cows he owns, the wives each having their own hut within this section, shared with livestock: a large area for cows, smaller for goats, donkeys, etc...a circle of thorns inside for baby cows, and as I said, the baby goats sleep inside the huts each night.
At this boma, the old father has had 10 wives in his time, with maybe 40 or so children, no one knows for sure, without the counting. Most of the female siblings have married and moved on to new husband's family bomas; the brothers marrying and setting up sections of their own within the whole. Children of all ages, cows, goats, donkeys, fully decorated Masai warriors, women of all ages and stages, all the wives of the many brothers living together harmoniously. Each person has their own specific chores: all the housework, cooking, fetching wood, milking of the animals, children, building and maintaining the mud huts, clearing, washing up, shaving the heads of the children, husband and warriours and beading is the responsibility of the women - with children and young girls helping. Young boys learn herding from the time they can walk. It is not unusual to see these little guys, aged 4 on, draped in tattered red and blue sheets with only a stick to wack at wayward goats out there with the backdrop of green hills all day long, from early morning till sunset - without water, without food.
The older boys, age 12 and on up, warriors now, Morani...having successfully endured and accomplished the most important ceremony of their lives, circumcism, where the act is done at the same time alongt with tens,hundreds of other boys - each operation performed sitting down outside the boma of the mother, without anaesetic, using the same knife from one boy to the next, each one without breathing, without moving a muscle - a sign of honour and strength to his family. Morani have the responsibility of the cows, revered amongst the Masai, each day walking them to further pastures in search of water, grasses, herding, buying and selling, medicine and finally during ceremonies, the slaughtering, skinning and roasting. The rest of the time, Morani are entertained by young girls in the community.

The job of the traditional Masai chief is to sit in a plastic chair outside the boma of his wives to greet and listen to the problems of people in his community, some walking to see him for twenty or thirty kilometres, easily. WE joined him that night at the boma, as night fell, an almost the full moon casting its perverbial silver light spilling magically over eerily structured fences, cows, Morani, huts and children. Cow bells tinkled, donkeys braying, squawking like old men at a coctail party - the women off cooking in a special kitchen hut. Two men are shown in...each grave, sitting a distance from each other. One has gone to the community land offices and has officially been granted a large piece of land to build his family boma. When he arrives at the site, he finds it has been already taken, built on by another man. He is angry, a fight ensues, they take the problem back to the land offices who send them to the Chief. This is an easy one, the chief tells us. He simply tells man number one to allow man number two to continue the possession of this land as he has already built fences and huts, and offers another large plot as compensation. Everyone is happy, they stay the night and leave as friends in the morning.
A good five hours later our dinner arrives, a large round dish of rice mixed with vegetables we provided; Sierra has had a banana and is asleep on top of the sheet of cowhide thrown on the ground at our feet. We wait for the ceremony the Chief has organized for our visit, as neighbouring Moranis begin to appear in full dress from outside bomas, young girls Sierra's age of 7 and older clustering together, each one with a wide white beaded circle of decoration at their throat, warming up, singing in high pitched tones...the MORANI come and go, these warriors who have the full strength and support of the entire community, arrogant, haughty some of them, beautiful, high cheek boned, tall, over 6 foot five, lanky and lean. The come and go silently, sinking into the darkness, into bomas, huts drinking cow milk and blood readying themselves for the traditional dance they are about to perform.....
The Chief tells us it is time. Sierra awakens thankfully, we do not let her out of our sight. WE move through fences over freshly made cow dung, sticking and squishing into our sandles, shoes amongst the cows, the dance is to begin...

The warriors bunch together in a circle tightly as our boys do in a football huddle, the young girls on the outside. The boys are making sounds in unison, the intake and outtake of their breath, each one together the sounds getting louder and louder in this first part of the ceremony...the girls high voices much like those of our First Nation people in their drum ceremonies...in their way cheering the boys on.....it gets louder and louded, the boys moving together up and down, but still standing in one circle - i learn later that in this first part of the dance, it personifies the killing of the lion, with the girls outside giving support....

Next the warriors are in a big semi circle at one end, the girls at the other, the girls tilting their white neckpieces enticingly rythmically, up and down and singing in their sweet young high voices..the boys in groups of two or three race down to the girls, darting toward them, close in on them and then leaping back to the formation of their semi circle..the voices the chanting changing with this dance, they dart, leap back and forth, louder and louder, the boys and girls singing. This part I am told the next morning, is in memory of the days when Masai left their bomas in search of cows to steal in neighbouring tribes...the darting toward the girls is the running in to steal the cows - the Chief explaining that Masai believe that all cows rightfully belong to Masai- then the grabbing of the cows and bringing them back safely to their bomas....

And finally the jumping, the Masai warriors darting into the middle of the circle, two and three at a time, and making their famous unbelievable high leaps into the air, shouting! Their long hair, tied into tails, flying into the night, up high and back down, over and over, the shout, cheering....it goes on for half an hour this part.....revealing to us later, that the warriors are showing their happiness. ON the sides of the circle young boys watch, jumping a little on their own, darting into the circle with the warriors, i am sure dying for the day of their own circumcis, where they too can progress from LAYONI..to MORANI....to become men.

The Chief beckons us that it is time now for us to leave.
As the dancing and chanting continues, louder and louder, more insistant, the humming of the voices, the intake, outtake of the breath, the little girls, the jumping, the frenzy...we are not to stay. I know what it is that we are missing; it is time for us to take Sierra away. This is the custom, the practice of Masai, the ceremonies, the young girls and the Morani - centuries old, ancient in time....it is not for me to judge, but for me to acknowledge in these days of HIV AIDS..that this is a practice that someday soon, surely will have to stop.

We fall asleep on top of the cowhide bed made of cow dung and sticks, hard and too short, our legs curled up in the fetal position, all night long tossing from one side to the other, we three, with the tribe of baby goats squeezed in together, a thin wall away from where we sleep - farting, grunting, wacking their tails against the walls as if in the knocking at a door and shitting - the fresh smell of goat dung wafting lazily through the little hut. The Chief comes in a little later and crawls into bed with his first wife; little bed bugs make their presence known, here and there, small uneventful little bites...all through what is left of the night until morning.

Five hours later, we have walked the moors...i have my video camera taking the most exotic footage i could imagine, playing with the children, meditating and waiting in this timeless zone of life moving along very very slowly, the Morani awakening, cows and goats filing out into pasture with young boys, the capturing and slaughtering of a chosen sheep, its fur carefully punched away from its body with a tight fist skillfully and sliced away...a small fire with the leg, ribs, parts of the body on stakes and roasting. WE are sitting in a grove of trees in good shadow, the hot midday sun beating down, a blanket of cowhide, small pieces of lamb passed from the knife cut and given in thanks, first to the Morani who sit a bit away from our little party, and then on to us...it is out of this world as we know it, this nomadic, primitive life unchanged again for centuries, these people practicing the same ceremonies, chores, lives as their ancestors and as the ones who came before them. They have shared fully with us, given us everything they have, allowed us the priviledge of peaking a little into their world....it is boggling, it is miraculous, it is awe inspiring, and for us, it has not been easy....

Charles truck comes...we move quickly through the heat of day,collecting our bags, our goodbyes, with one last ceremony where Sierra is given a Masai name by the women...the flies are mean, following us into the truck, hundreds of them into our backpacks, my camera case, the windows open, we move on, and back to our world thankfully.....