This evening on the edge of the Serengeti we stopped at a genuine Masai village. Travellers are used to schlocky scams like thatched huts with air conductioning vents and TV antennas. Or like the pobrecita familia in Leon Nicaragua for whom my classmates and professors built two habitat for humanity houses ourselves over a week, and whom I followed from the goodbye ceremony around the corner and down an alley and saw get in their new Toyota 4runner. Oops. No, the Masai village is legit. They are living in traditional poverty even if they are brining in a good $400 profit per car load every hour during season.
I realized tonight that I love giving people things. I have been giving my travel mates gifts for days. On reflection, it is my old personality but uninhibited by the frontal lobe damage. I give myself a budget in such places like Burma or kenya, $100/day for local art or clothes when it is obviously going back into the local economy. It's much more efficient than spending it in a posh hotel. Maybe not if staying in a b&b or pensione. Tipping guides is good, too.
A few travel mates in Burma were hyper critical of being an ugly tourist dropping money, but if you look at the developmental economics, it's actually exactly the opposite. Those are the tourists who are helping the loical impoverished economy and traditional culture the most, if they keep their wits about them in the process.
Today I bought more gifts for friends with whom I am staying in America so I can reverse those costs anyway, and then it is great value for the money.
The village was simple, soft dirt ringed by grass huts, a circular table with goods obviously manufactured in the village: jewellery, art, basic cookware out of wood or beads. I got bracelets, an amazing a acacia tree nut necklace, a giraffe statue, a zebra. All obviously handmade and used in the village itself.
The villagers broke into gender groups to dance. The women were not interesting despite kidnapping our two women and making them dance. Simultaneously, the men were doing a bouncing contest. Later, I borrowed the guide's Masai walking stick and bounced with them, though surgeon dr Solomon and physio Claire would frown at that. I got the good idea to raid my trip med stores and gave the guide a box each of ibuprofen and Panadol with strict instructions to only take one per day for pain or fever, and that was not stronger but poisonous. The dr with us was wary of OD but I think the benefits outweigh the risks, and the guide went to English language boarding school in Arusha and can read.
The tribal guide kept offering me his Masai walking stick but when I finally accepted, he hemmed and hawed and backed down! Not sure what THAT was about.
I do love my acacia seed necklace, hope it doesn't have bugs!
Our guide ushered three of us, the youngest three, into a low ceilinged hut pieced together from natural sisal and straw along with cardboard and plastic trash collects from the nearby roadside, similar to what homeless folks in America might construct, except of course this is traditional, and there were separate rooms in which the parents and kids sleep. Grandparents get their own hut.
I filmed the conversation which I will attach here. As we were leaving I let the euros go first and in the creepy homeless shelter, I cornered the guide and asked him about his circumcision ceremony. At 16 years old, without anaesthetic or sanitising alcohol, he submitted himself to what he said was the most horrible, painful procedure, and that strength of character and lack of fear is what proves he is a man. I asked him what year 15 was like, and he said it was pure dread.
The tribe maintains a school with about twenty cute little well behaved kids, but who got very excited when they saw my echidna. Some of then go to boarding school in ngorogoro or for the best, Arusha.
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