DR Update 1

DR UPDATE

DR is going very well.  We started community transects a couple of days ago to interview people about bushmeat hunting in the area.  We’ve almost completed them with the exception of interviewing a dozen rangers that we will get when we go to the community ranch for our final day of car transects.  It’s been so nice to be out of those damn cars and away from the same people day in and day out and to finally be walking around.  Ashley is also a Godsend.  She is just as committed as I am and pulls more than her own weight. 

Our first day was a little clustered.  Ashley and I had assigned everyone partners (non-randomly and with a sinister edge, of course) to maximize the quality of interviews conducted.  I don’t think that helped.  For some reason I was always the last one finished and had the fewest number of interviews, but they were very thorough.  Unfortunately, two of us can’t conduct 400 interviews on our own and have to depend on other people despite their work ethic.  For any of you who might ever do a community surveys, know it’s more about quality than quantity.  I think that rule applies to most things in life. 

It’s been an amazing experience though.  I love my guide.  Abra went to college, is a teacher, helps house his students, helps families in need, is a writer, a guide, makes carvings, plays guitar, and is wonderful with people. Children are drawn to him.  He runs 18km every morning!  It’s hard for me to believe him, but he’s not the lying type.  He is very compassionate, funny, warm, very curious, non-judgmental and helpful.  Many times if someone was planting trees, weeding their fields, making food, cleaning dishes, or fixing a bicycle he would insist on helping.  Did I mention he’s pretty darned cute too?  Let me tell you, it was really difficult to spend four full straight days with him.  You should also know he is 28 and has two children by his girlfriend whom he doesn’t live with because she says that he works too much.  He goes to their home every evening though to see them.  The only fault I’ve seen in him was his willingness to barter me off to a Maasai boma.

I’ve heard so many phenomenal tales in the last few days and met some of the kindest people to walk this earth.  They welcome you right into their homes and offer you tea, a potato, watermelon, sardines, anything they have.  Someone sincerely offered me their child and Emily and Connor actually brought home a gifted goat!  And Maasai are the nicest of them all.  I guess if Abra could have successfully bartered me off I’d want to go to them.  The most beautiful, wise and soft-spoken 32 year old (and single) man I’ve met here lived in that boma.  And he was wealthy- over fifty shoats and twent heads of cattle! It was hard for me to pay attention to the interview and not stare…as long as he’d take me as his first wife.  Maybe I’m a little serious.  I’ve never had the Hollywood tongue-tied infatuation moments before, but during this interview I was frequently forgetting myself and stumbling back to asking questions.  No wonder they couldn’t agree on a bride price.  I probably seemed a little slow.

Sorry, back to the main story.  This day it was just Abra and I in Maasai land rather than the two of us and Adam (my partner from previous days).  Someone stayed home sick but their partner didn’t feel comfortable being alone and I did so Adam moved groups.  Anyway, in Maasai culture, girls usually marry around 16 and start having children.  At one of the first bomas a group of young men (whom Abra was helping fix bike tires) commented on my beauty and then asked if I was Abra’s wife.  No.  Girlfriend?  Yes, fifteenth (he was joking since one of the young men had commented earlier that he had two.  I don’t know how the Maasai do it.  I think one girlfriend/wife would be a headache).  They asked my bride price and Abra started bartering me off right there!  He insisted after it was a joke but it sure didn’t have the tone of a joke to me.  Anyways, word spreads fast through Maasai land (via running children) and after that every boma we went to commented on my bride price.  One woman even joked she’d give him her eleven year-old daughter, 20 goats and 12 cows for me.  That’s a very good price in case you were wondering.  My elementary school bullies can shove their “Jenny’s worth a penny” tauntings up their asses. 

But that’s how the day went.  People were so welcoming.  We walked a good distance and were the last ones done by hours and with fairly few interviews.  However, I liked taking my time with people.  Maasai speak the language of Maa but some speak Kiswahili.  They were shocked when I knew a little too and even spoke a little Maa.  I enjoyed asking them questions and getting learning more about their culture.  The same woman who had offered Abra her daughter for me and I had a great quip about our ear piercings (their’s are very big and I have only two small ones) and tattoos.  They have scars on their faces that we compared with my horse and feathers.  She asked why I hid it rather than display them on my face and I said “Mama yangu hapendi,” which means that my Mom doesn’t like it.  She got a kick out of that. 

It was also interesting to see the dramatic change in boma status just within a 1km distance.  We were already about 2km from the main road to Mto wa Mbu.  The first boma was large and most of the men spoke fluent Swahili, the children attended school, one boy even spoke some English, and they all appeared healthy, free of colds and still had most of their teeth.  The Ibrien (old man of the house) was also very sweet and welcomed me back any day to have chai, eat their traditional food, speak with his son in English and maybe teach him some too.  I’m telling you, this kind of open kindness is so different from anything in the states.  Farther out, people in the bomas starting getting more sickly, had fewer teeth, and near the end of our transect, where the woman who wanted to buy me lived, they had numerous eye deformities, lost teeth, and sick children.  Fewer people also spoke Swahili within the minor1km distance we walked.  That’s just such an amazing change gradient to me.

Other wonderful things to note about the Maasai that day:  all of the breasts. So many breasts and babies feeding off of breasts.  I met girls my age or younger with one or two children already and I will never breast feed!  I never want my boobs to look like theirs! Gotta keep ‘em perky forever.  There were sometimes even 8, 9, 12 women per boma (aka per one man) and they had over 20 small children hanging around.  I don’t even want to think about how many older children they had.  One woman in the farthest boma looked to be 65 years old but was obviously in her third trimester.  Still goin’ strong, still spittin’ ‘em out I guess.  Just the psychology and activities behind the reality of a 65 year-old among all of those other women being pregnant is odd to think about.  The man of the house is obviously sleeping with all of them enough to have all of those kids and keep a 65ish-year-old pregnant.  Where’s the appeal?  How are the women okay with that?  To each his own I guess.

However, I found myself feeling a little pathetic when they asked me if I was married or if I had children.  I could feel the perplexed judgments they were making.  A women’s role is to abide her husband, care for the house, and have children.  I sometimes felt a failure in their eyes, or at the least that something was wrong with me.  The first day I met Abra he even asked me if I had children and his interest slightly piqued when I said I didn’t.  I am overwhelmingly glad that I am born of a culture where I can go in any direction with my decisions in life but we are under scrutiny when we interact with others just as much as they are.

Back to bushmeat:  I met a man who used to be a poacher but was jailed for five years for a murder he did not commit.  In the 80’s, he recounted that animals were so plentiful that after 5pm one couldn’t walk to town because it was too dangerous.  Now there are only dik diks and the occasional gazelle.  If he could, he would return every wild animal life he had taken.  He wants his children and their children to be educated about nature and to be able to know wildlife other than just in history books.  I met a woman abandoned by her husband three years ago who cares for her five children by herself on only 20,000 Tanzanian shillings a week ($11.6USD).  Of course they eat bushmeat.  She recommends I try zebra (as many people do) and says that if I come back she will prepare some for me.  Despite her poor position, she is still so giving.  This is what I mean about the people here.  While there, I learned how to prepare guppy chips (yes, the little fish, dried in the sun, and then we popped their heads off), talked with her 14 year-old son who hunts dik diks and rabbits and is excited to learn how to hunt big game, about the different methods and wildlife between Tanzania and America, and then left them with a book on East-African wildlife. 

Then today we interviewed known poachers.  Our guides know or are related to many of them and thus were able to convince them that they would incur no harm to themselves by talking with us.  They even got paid.  I don’t know how that’s sound science and it’s good to know that my tuition is going towards paying poachers, but I guess you gotta do what you gotta do. ‘Bring a poacher to work day’ really was an amazing opportunity to be a part of and my favorite day of interviews so far.  The young man Abra and I were interviewing was 19 and had been hunting for 5 years.  We talked about the different species he hunts, why, where and how.  We covered every who, what, why, where, and how I could think of (even those not on the questionnaire) and I was so captivated.  After the interview he asked about animals that are hunted in the states, how they are hunted, and the penalties for illegal hunting.  I was glad I had got him warmed up enough to open up and ask questions because he seemed very nervous at the beginning.  Don’t worry- the bucket I was sitting on collapsed and we got to joke about how large I am.  Honestly, I think I’ve embarrassed myself during the last few days of interviews more than in my whole life!  I’ve collapsed a bucket, lost my wrap in front of an elderly man we were interviewing, and said the wrong thing way too many times! 

At least we got good data from the hunters, no matter how much they were paid.  Some of them hunt a lot!  I’m surprised there are any animals left.  Some of them hunt a little.  Some of them would or wouldn’t stop hunting depending on having another job.  Some have been caught by the authorities and been beaten, sent to jail, and forced to pay fines, some many times.  Some hunt for money, others for their families.  Some were taught by their fathers, some by friends, and others taught themselves.  One man even has taught himself to make a living out of catching live animals and selling them to international zoos.  I’m talking about catching live hyenas all by himself here!  One thing’s for certain, these men are resourceful, determined, and they’re not going anywhere fast.  Poaching, at this stage, is an unavoidable evil.

As I was sitting there for my poacher interview something else hit me.  It’s very strange to think about the future.  Abra and I have amazing eye contact and our eyes were locked as he was translating one of the young man’s answers for me.  It wasn’t anything romantic, but our eye contact had always been on an oddly intimate level.  We’d always been comfortable.  I realized then that this was nearly the last time I would be looking into those eyes.  I spent four whole days traversing the landscape of the outskirts of Mto wa Mbu with this man, having lighthearted, interesting, and sometimes very serious conversations with him.  I realized that his face has become a very comfortable and pleasant part of my day and I may never see him again.  I will miss him.  I appreciate him for being him- an amazing individual whom I learnt a lot about life, especially for showing compassion for others from.  He is an authentically good person.  I think I knew that the first day I met him, too.  I spent our first lunch together bombarding him with questions about the food he likes to ensure I brought him the best lunch I could the following day. I took pleasure in putting together his favorites in the mornings.  I even snagged vegetables with mushrooms, which he rarely has but loves.  I didn’t have to pack him a lunch on poacher day since we all only met for an hour, but I left him with a bad of mushrooms and new knowledge about how some mushrooms in America make you see funny things, a book he had been coveting and my many thanks.  I hope he knows how much I appreciate his help and guidance these last few days.