Boma Stay

(This post was created a long time ago but I forgot to post it... Enjoy!)

Today was home stay day!  It was wonderful! Female students were taken in pairs and male students in groups of four to be dropped off at different Maasai bomas around the community.  The ladies shadowed mamas at the bomas while the young men helped the morans (warriors) and boys in the field and at pasture. 

My partner and I were driven out to our boma on what I like to call a driveway- African style (aka no true road path at all, just manhandling the land cruiser over large boulders, deep ditches, and many shrubs).  When we arrived at our boma, we were left with a jug of drinking water for the day, cooking ingredients for lunch, and a hand-held radio to be used for emergency contact with SFS only.  We walked through the front entrance of the boma to be greeted by our mama, with whom we quickly established that our quicly growing Swahili skills would be of no use since she only spoke Maasai.  This language barier barely mattered, for the rest of the day we utilized a lot of sign language to get our points across.

We spent the first few hours of the morning feeding the calves and baby shoats who are too young to go out with the herds and then gathered wood with our mama and the other women of the boma.  This entailed gathering small wood with a machete up to a mile from their home, laying it strategically on a leather strap, then bracing the weight with our heads.  The same process was repeated later after filling water jugs in a stream a ten-minute walk from their home.  Have you ever carried thirty pounds with your head?  It’s hard!  These are some dedicated mamas! 

 After morning chores, we sat and socialized with some of the best chai tea I’ve ever tasted and then made lunch, which consisted of ugali, a corn starch and water patty, and a cabbage and animal fat dish.  All cooking is done inside their little homes.  It gets very hot and very smoky in there.  The mamas also touch the pans that have been over the hot fire with their bare hands without burning themselves!  I swear, they are super women!  The lunch was surprisingly good.  All dishwashing afterwards was camping style in one bowl for washing and one for rinsing.  

After lunch, the mamas surprised us.  They asked us to help them with a house within the compound that was being built.  What’s so surprising about that, you ask?  Well, bomas are built out of sticks, elephant grass, and… .drumroll please….. cow poop!  Yup, cow poop.  The biggest pile of cow dung I have ever seen was in the middle of this up and coming structure and we were responsible for mixing in sand and water to make proper plastering for the walls.  And we did it!  Up to our elbows!  And then we took handfuls of it and slammed them into the cracks between sticks because poop can’t just be placed on the wall, it has to be forcibly added.  I must admit that it was actually a lot of fun.

And we were rewarded after the dung flinging with another round of hot sweet chai tea, cooing a six-day-old infant named Joshua, and bracelet making from which we received the bracelets our mamas made.  We were the only pair to receive gifts from our bomas, a gesture that is not encouraged by SFS for either students or host families. When our ride came to pick us up, we weren’t quite yet ready to leave and so we made the mile-or-so journey back to KBC on our own.

Overall, the boma home stay was an amazing experience.  The mamas were so much fun, so welcoming, and so generous.  They laughed constantly at the livestock, at the children, and many times at us, but their laughter was always happy and contagious.  By the end of the day, they were also holding our hands and leaning on us like they did one another.  Despite the language barriers, I feel that I had begun to cultivate substantial and meaningful friendships with some beautiful people and they must have felt the same.  They invited us to come back whenever we pleased, and since we are in walking distance, I plan to definitely take them up on that offer.  The good-natured manner of the Maasai is so pure and honest that they are impossible not to fall in love with. 

Who the heck thought it was a good idea to                   This is how the mamas carry firewood and water.  It is a pain in the neck!

give me a machete?

Their faucet...

My mama prepping me for poop play...

Yes, that is ALL COW POOP!

YAY TEAM COW POOP!

Baby Joseph.  It's actually a really embarrassing story.  We were all
hanging around after playing with poop and one of the mamas had a
baby belly.  I reached out to point at it in a questioning manner...
because I obviously can't ask about it in English or Maa and it made
for a huge hysteria with the woman and I being very embarrassed but
the rest of the mamas were laughing hysterically.  Emily and my mama
then led us into this building where she pulled out baby Joseph and
put him in my arms.  Babies, no matter the race, are so freaking tiny!

Doesn't Emily look like she'd make a great mom?

Bracelet making with the mamas...

Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Da.