An unconventional Christmas

I’m sorry that it has been so long since my last post, but these last few months have been a bit of a whirlwind. If you thought my Thanksgiving was untraditional, wait until you hear about my Christmas.

For Christmas, myself and a group of fellow Peace Corps Volunteers decided to sign up for a cultural tour and spend Christmas with a Maasai tribe, located just a few hours from Iringa. This tribe was located in a sub-village of a former PCV who recently returned to America, and she helped this particular tribe set up an income generating activity by hosting tours in their village to share their culture with tourists.

We boarded a bus on December 23 and headed 5 hours to a small village called Makifu. When we got off the bus, we were met by a member of the Maasai and he led us on a 3 km walk away from civilization (the booming civilization of the village), toward the Maasai village. As we walked, I asked him why the Maasai lived so far away from the main village along the road, and he told me that “the villagers don’t like all the yelling, singing and drumming that we do. We make a lot of noise and keep them awake.”

dry river beds around the Maasai village valley

beautiful northern Iringa

By the time we arrived, it was dark, so we put our bags into our bomas (huts) where we would be sleeping. They are constructed purely of mud, sticks, and straw. In fact, both nights that we slept in them, I was awakened in the middle of the night by a cow eating the straw roof my lodging accommodations.

The boma I slept in

After ditching our bags, we huddled around a campfire and ate a typical meal of rice, beans and papaya. With our bellies full, it was now time to dance!

Darryl around the campfire

Both men and women got up, the men in one group, the women in another. The two groups each formed their own kind of “line” and faced each other. The men started to sing a bass line, unlike anything I had ever heard, and other men started to join in to keep the beat. 

Then, random men would jump into the middle between the groups, jumping on every beat, higher than I have ever seen anyone jump in my life. These men are amazing athletes.

That man hovering above everyone else is jumping... he has one amazing vertical

When the men gave a vocal signal, several women/girls would come forward into the middle and move the a very fast, convulsing motion to make the jewelry on their chest and neck jump and jingle while the men got up in their face. When the man decided the woman had been brave long enough, they brushed shoulders and the girl was dismissed back to the group.

After dancing for about an hour, we called it a night and went to bed. The beds we slept on were straw mattresses with a blanket over the straw and a bug net over top. The walls of the bomas had holes in them and when it rained, the straw roofs had a slight leaking problem…

But before I knew it, it was time to start a new day, Christmas Eve. After getting ready for the day and having some breakfast, we set out on a tour of the Maasai village to see where they were living, how they kept their live stock and what kinds of plants were in the area and how the people used them for different things.

When we returned to our lodging area, we were greeted by many mamas holding traditional Maasai garments and jewelry and told us to follow them. They lead the women into one hut and the men into another and one by one, the Mzungu emerged from the mud huts in traditional dress. 

The crew plus our guides in front of a boma  in our traditional dress

Lauren and I in our Maasai wear

the men in their traditional clothing

Man, were those things comfortable! It was like wearing a toga, so soft and breezy. The jewelry on the other hand,  not so comfortable. It’s made of wire and beads, and since no Maasai women have hair longer than any of the men, they never thought through the issue of hair-pulling.

After being dressed in our garb, we were taken out to herd cattle. We walked several km to where the herds were being kept and learned that each heard was made up of cattle from multiple owners. While branding exists here to distinguish whose are whose, each herder also has a specific whistle that the cattle respond to. The children seemed to love us, holding our hands, playing games and showing off. After we left the cattle, we continued walking around to see more of the locally available plants and their uses. We even found the vine that they use to brush their teeth. They cut a small portion off, carve one end into the point like a tooth pick and cut a couple slits in the other end to get it started. The blunt end gets rubbed over your teeth and there is a chemical in the plant that supposedly kills the bacteria. It was fun to try. 

Sunhee hand-in-hand with some of the children heading to the cattle

herding cattle

brushing her teeth

we called this one Honey Badger. He looks stoic now, but I watched him eat dirt...

 After the tour, we returned back to the village for dinner, followed by more singing and dancing, but now that we were in proper dress, we were expected to join in. We all learned very quickly how foolish we looked and just as quickly got over it.

Girls in our group preparing to enter the middle to shake our stuff

The man circle

The next day was Christmas, and since Tanzania was colonized by Europeans, Christmas meant Church. We dressed up in the same traditional clothing and headed to the church where we sat though a very traditional Lutheran service.  Very few men attended service, for they were slaughtering a goat (and drinking it’s blood) for the Christmas feast that followed church.

The church we attended Christmas Day

 After the Christmas service and feasting were over, we returned to our huts to change and gather our things, because we had to leave and to go a camp down the road for the night (we had to catch a bus at 6am the next day and didn’t want to have to walk the 3km walk in the dark.)

The campground we stayed at was very nice. We slept in tents, but the tents all had full twin-sized beds inside. The facility had warm showers, our lodging price included a beautiful, traditional Tanzanian meal and then they lit a campfire for us, so we spent Christmas night gathered around a campfire being eaten by mosquitoes.

hanging around the fire Christmas night

My Christmas may have been a little untraditional, but I had an amazing time with people I only met 6 months ago that have become my new little family. When you are away from home, you have to find new little pseudo families of caring people. I’m glad there are so many of those people in Peace Corps Tanzania.

Merry Christmas!