Maasai Land

Sorry its been so long since my last posting. I've been on safari for four days and then took a train directly to Mombasa right when I got back, so I haven't had time. Of course, I'll write about these events soon. Here is the much-awaited Maasai Land post.

One of my favorite parts of travel is stepping on the plane knowing that in the very near future, I’ll be meeting incredible people and experiencing events I’ll remember for the rest of my life; it’s just that the specifics haven’t been worked out yet. You don’t plan on meeting wealthy Tanzanian bankers or getting ritualistic Maasai warrior burns when you plan out your travel itinerary back at home. But when you stay flexible and keep an open mind, opportunities open up for you that you might not even have imagined as even being options in the first place. These past three days have been one of those experiences in my life that I’m sure will make the cut as a “life flash” moment. I call a “life flash” moment any life experience significant and/or unique enough to qualify as things that will flash before my eyes the instant before I die (sorry if that sounds morbid, bit it’s something I think about every now and then).
I never really planned on going out to visit the Maasai when I got here. They were interesting when I saw them in a National Geographic magazine as a kid, but I just didn’t really share the strong appeal of meeting them in person that so many people here seem to feel. For several of the volunteers, living and working with the Maasai was their reason for coming out here in the first place. I had heard through the grapevine that there was a remote medical clinic out in Saikiri, a small village about 2 hours outside of Nairobi (don’t bother whipping out a map; you’ll be wasting your time). I figured going out there for a few days would be a great way to indulge my romantic fantasies about doing medical work in the middle of nowhere. And what better time is there than mid-February to indulge romantic fantasies?
The trip to the village was a mini-adventure in itself. Bonface rode a bus with Hanna and me out to Ngong, a market town some 30 minutes from where we lived. We walked a few minutes past hastily-erected fruit stalls and through narrow side streets to get to a small lot. There was no way we would have figured it all out if Bonface hadn’t accompanied us. In the lot sat an old pickup truck that must have been around since the Carter Administration, a matatu that would have been shot a long time ago had it been a horse, an a few motorbikes. Bonface tried haggling with them to get us a low price to Saikiri.
Everyone was offering us prices which were at least double the usual asking price: We were getting the Standard Mazungu Price. After much negotiation, we were left with two realistic options: We could shell out a lot of money ($4) and take a motorbike, which was relatively comfortable and fast, or we could pay $1 and take the pickup truck. We chose the pickup truck. At one point, this small truck was carrying 17 people, along with massive bags of grains and luggage. At least we didn’t have to ride with goats, which we later found out was a common occurrence.
This was one of those “Am I really here right now doing this?” moments which I seem to be having a lot of in Kenya. There I was, sitting in the bed of an ancient pickup truck with a small bag containing little more than toiletries, medicines, and my stethoscope heading out to the African brush to work in a small clinic. I’m not going to lie, I felt pretty damn cool. I mean, how many other people experience something like this in their lifetime? Over the shoulders of my fellow passengers, I watched the landscape slowly transition from the familiar grass and dirt to a world of red dust, bone-dry brush, and Acacia trees. This was the first time I had seen a place like this. I mean, I’d seen places like this in movies that were set in Africa, but this place looked so…foreign. With the language barrier between us and the other occupants, we could only look at each other and smile. I heard a cell phone go off. A man wearing traditional Maasai clothing was actually talking on his cell phone! That juxtaposition of the ancient and traditional against the modern was a bit much for my brain to handle on top of everything else it was trying to process at the moment.
After a two hour long ride down increasingly bumpy roads and through increasingly desolate terrain, we finally arrived at our destination. I grabbed my bag and jumped out the back of the truck and was immediately greeted by about a dozen kids wearing tattered school uniforms. We took pictures together, they asked about Obama (apparently, all Americans know Obama personally), and then pointed us up the road to the clinic. When we arrived there, we asked to see Maggie, the 28 year old nurse who ran the clinic. Maggie was the bee’s knees, we were told, and I was really looking forwards to working with her. She introduced herself, along with Carol from Brussels, Brittany from Newport, VA, and David and Emma, a young couple from Scotland that was in our orientation group. Carol was actually born in Kenya but had been living and going to medical school in Belgium. She was in the village for 7 months, super smart, and fluent in about 5 languages. Europeans have a way of making me feel a little stupid by admitting I only know 3 languages. Brittany was very fun to hang out with. We would drive ourselves crazy by reminiscing about and craving American foods like cheesesteak and Chik-fil-A waffle fries. It was fun and torturous at the same time, but when you’ve gone over two weeks without a Wendy’s Double Classic Cheeseburger Combo (without onions, with Dr. Pepper, please), it’s hard not to do what we did. (FYI: As I typed that last sentence, my stomach growled very loudly.)
Brittany took Hanna and I to see the school that she was teaching at. We got there right as classes were being dismissed for the day. The school was much larger than I imagined it would have been considering it was out in the middle of nowhere. About 400 students attended the school, many of them walking for an hour to get there. It seemed that every single student there that day shook our hands. Greeting everyone we saw was a running theme throughout our three days there. I thought about what people back home would think of someone who shook hands and said a simple hello to everyone they met; they probably would have thought they were weird or creepy, which made me a little sad to think about.
Like seemingly everyone else in Kenya, the Maasai children had trouble pronouncing my name. After struggling for a bit, they decided to give me a Maasai name: My new Maasai name is Lamyan, which means “blessed.” The kids assaulted me with a million questions: “What was I doing in Saikiri? What is your favorite football team? Why did I have so much hair on my arms?” When they asked about my arm hair, I pulled my shirt up to reveal my dense jungle of chest hair. Their reaction was priceless: There was screaming. There was laughter. One girl simply turned around and walked over towards Brittany. Brittany asked her to ask me about my chest hair, and she replied “No. I am scared.” Hahaha! The kids were really fun to hang out with and were hilarious. I promised myself I would try to play soccer with them before I left.
Hanna and I said our goodbyes to the children and walked with Carol and Brittany to the village. The Maasai village was not what I was expecting. Then again, like much of Kenya, I really didn’t know what to expect. Most of the two dozen or so buildings were made of corrugated steel sheets and wood rather than the mud and dung that I imagined. If I didn’t know any better, I would have thought that Saikiri was sponsored by SafariCom, one of the main mobile and wireless providers in Kenya. Half of the buildings were painted in the distinctive SafariCom Green and covered with its logos.
After exploring the village for a bit, we made our way back to Maggie’s place just as the sun was setting. Maggie had to go drop a volunteer off at the airport and would be back late at night. We all sat around the small concrete courtyard and helped prepare dinner and drank some of the most amazing chai I’ve ever had. I don’t know if the chai was just objectively good or it was the situation I was having it in, like the way a simple sausage with bread tastes incredible after a long day of camping, or wine that would be considered vinegar in any other occasion tastes like a bottle from God’s personal cellar when you’re enjoying it with new friends in a new place. Since I’ve been here, I’ve come to appreciate simple pleasures more and more. I never would have considered sitting around, talking, and peeling potatoes in a remote place with no electricity or running water to be my idea of a nice evening, but I was really enjoying myself. It was nice being able to take things slowly and talk about anything and everything and nothing. By being constantly connected via internet and mobile phone, we are paying the paradoxical price of being more isolated from each other than ever before. I don’t even know my own neighbors back at home; that situation is unthinkable out here. Out here, I marvel at the resilience and adaptability of the human race. We seem to be able to survive and even thrive in the harshest of conditions. Living without electricity and running water was a small adjustment to make, and I was pleased that it was more painless and easier to get used to than I imagined it would be. I guess the difference is that in America our infrastructure is so dependent on these things just in order to simply run, so when we lose these seeming necessities of life the effects are crippling. Out here people have lived this way for hundreds of years and many continue to do so. I also thought that for all the talk of the global economic downturn, there will be millions of people around the world who will remain virtually untouched by it. These people aren’t worried about securing mortgage-backed lines of credit to finance their business; they rely on their product and their word.
As the sun set, I realized another price that we pay for our modern way of life: For the first time in my life, I saw stars. Truly saw them. Thousands upon thousands of them. I could make out the Milky Way. I could peer into the seemingly empty looking spaces and discover even more stars if I squinted hard enough. We were looking for shooting stars and thought we saw one that kept lingering; we were actually looking at a satellite. I stood out there for about 10 minutes and just stared with my jaw on the floor. It was heartbreaking to think that I’ve been on this planet for twenty three years now and this was the first time I was seeing how many stars were actually in the sky. It also made me sad to think of how many people will never experience what I was experiencing, especially with increasing light and air pollution around the world. It was humbling and reminded me of how small and inconsequential we humans are in the big picture.
That night we cooked some food using a coal burning stove and ate by lantern light. We later freaked ourselves out with scary stories and even tried using a handmade Ouija board, which never did end up working for us. We said goodnight and I retired to my closet-sized bedroom. I checked my room for spiders and other creepy-crawlies more thoroughly than I usually would have since I was freaked out from the stories we were just telling. It’s a good thing I did, because there was a massive spider (by American standards) on the inside of my mosquito net that I probably wouldn’t have noticed had I not been so thorough. Ghost stories have their practical benefits, I suppose. The wind sounded like it was gale force as it wailed over the burlap and plastic roof of my shed. It was so loud, I had to take some Benadryl from my first-aid kit just to get to sleep.
I woke up the next day, groggily stumbled outside and peed while a herd of goats watched me, and ate a quick breakfast. I was ready to start my day and check out what this clinic was all about. Of course, we were on “Kenyan Time,” something I have a love-hate relationship with. The clinic opened at 9 A.M., but of course, in typical Kenyan fashion, we unlocked the doors a bit after 10. Everything looked ancient and was covered with a dusting of the powdery red dirt that’s found in the region. This damn dirt seems to get everywhere, carried along by the strong winds in the valley. Although the meds and equipment looked like they hadn’t been used in years, I found out that the clinic is wiped down and cleaned every morning!
A knock at the door signaled the arrival of our first patient. Carol, Hanna, and I would be running the clinic by ourselves since Maggie was teaching a community health class. Thankfully, Carol knew Swahili and Maasai and patiently translated for us. The resources situation was even worse than in the clinic in Kawangware. There was no lab, no electricity, and no running water; it made the Wema Clinic look like the Mayo Clinic. It was frustrating not being able to order even the simplest of lab tests on patients who needed them. Patients were given broad-spectrum antibiotics for almost everything since we didn’t have a microscope or the ability to do cultures and all fevers were assumed to be malaria. Those that needed lab tests or further treatment were referred to the hospital in Ngong, about 2 hours away by matatu.
Some experiences reminded me of some of my patients back home. When a woman came in complaining of pain in her left flank, I asked her the usual questions with the help of the janitor, who acted as a translator.
“How long have you had this pain?”
“Six months.”
“When did it start?”
“After I fell on my left side.”
This other woman came in with a recurrent urinary tract infection that didn’t seem to respond to whatever we threw at it. When I asked her questions like how often she was urinating, what the volume of her urinations were like, or if the urine was cloudy or had blood in it, her husband would answer all the questions while the woman sat quietly. How the bloody hell would her husband know whether her urine was cloudy or not?! Women really seem to get the short end of the stick in Maasai culture. They cook, clean, raise kids, and do the manual labor. The men are mostly around for “protection.” They must have taken a cue from the lions that live alongside the Maasai; the lioness does all the work while the lion sits around and protects. I’ve seen women carrying massive loads of grains and children while her husband walks besides her carting only the stick which all Maasai men carry. I was surprised to learn that female circumcision is still widely practiced in the area. I know it might be considered anthropocentric or whatever to consider the practice barbaric, but its hard not to.
We saw about a dozen patients or so that day. There was nothing too interesting, mostly malaria, upper respiratory tract infections, and the occasional headache or other common complaint thrown in for good measure. When doing this sort of work, you quickly realize how basic and routine things can get. But then again, we only have the capability to treat the basic and routine. As I mentioned earlier, I didn’t really know what to expect coming in, but I should have realized that this is what it would be like. There was tons of downtime between patients, which made me miss the clinic back in Nairobi which was busier.
We closed the clinic at around 5 PM or so. Maggie asked if Hanna and I wanted to do a home visit. Sure, I thought, it would be interesting to visit a patient in their home and deliver meds or whatever else needed to be done. We drove to a small village about 15 minutes away and walked inside the small hut. The person we were coming to visit was a mother who had lost her baby a few days ago. The baby had a congenital heart defect that wasn’t caught in time; even if the defect had been detected early, though, there would be no way she could afford the expensive treatment. The entire situation was very awkward. Hanna and I sat on a dirty dilapidated couch next to about half a dozen people whose language and culture we didn’t understand. All we could do was sit silently and stare into space as flies crawled all over us. All the women were in the room next to us with the mother who lost her child. After I couldn’t take it anymore, I asked Hanna if she wanted to go for a walk to escape the situation. We walked around the small village for a bit, hoping that Maggie would hurry up so we could get back home. Hanna remembered hearing something about how the Maasai don’t bury their dead and leave them outside to naturally decompose. I’m glad we never ran into the graveyard during our village exploration, because I’m not sure I could have handled the sight of a bloated and decaying 4 day old being picked apart by dogs and birds.
After about 2 hours of pure boredom, Maggie emerged from the hut. Now we would start walking back. No car. Through the desert. The hot, dusty desert. For over an hour, Hanna and I trudged along the dirt road back to the village. It was nice in a way, though, giving me time to think and appreciate the harsh beauty of the landscape. We got back and the sun set soon after. That night we would have two luxuries: Electricity and S’mores. Simon, Maggie’s boyfriend and a true Renaissance man, was going to turn on the diesel generator so we could have a bit of light and power for the television. We watched maybe 5 episodes of Prisonbreak on pirated DVD and made S’mores on the coal stove using African ingredients before the highlight of the night.
Earlier in the day I had decided to get ritual Maasai burns on my arm. The burns are made by rubbing a stick against a plank of wood until it begins to smoke and smolder. The red-hot stick is then pressed against the skin. After it heals, it leaves a nice looking scar of smooth shiny skin. How long do the marks last? I think the Maasai say it best: “Until you die…and then a little while longer.” I would be getting three dots slightly larger then a pencil eraser in the shape of a triangle on my right upper arm. The burns would be made by the Maasai watchman who guards the house and clinic at night.
I was expecting some elaborate ritual or something, but the whole thing felt sort of like a bunch of drunken friends getting together and doing it (I guess that says something about the type of company I keep). It was simple and about as painful as getting a tattoo. The stick was quickly spun on the wood until smoke came off of it and then it was pressed and held against my arm for about 5 seconds. The smell was a unique blend of burning wood and the unmistakable burnt chicken skin smell of burning flesh. When it was all over and done with, I had three small wounds on my arm that looked underwhelming considering the pain I went through to get them. They blistered nicely the next day, though.
The next day was pretty uneventful, which was nice because it gave me a chance to laze about and a good excuse to stop typing up this entry. Good bye!