Masai Mara and Week Five

Here we go… week five. Well the group (QMO) is getting into a good groove and we had a ridiculous meeting tonight…. mostly full of laughter, flashlights and ‘zzz’ oh and of course, the absent rapping (…Alex.) Sorry for the inside jokes, this stuff just had to be recorded.
Anyway, we started this week at a secondary school in Mathari. Today was a good day as we taught about gender and relationships and had time for a gender specific discussion. So the boys and girls split up and we got to hear about what was important to each group. After, the sexes presented their ideas to each other. Kenyans (at least the teens that we have taught so far) are very formal and polite especially in class presentations as both the male and female representative started off their address to the opposite sex with ‘Good evening’ I doubt that this would happen in Canada. Not that either is better than the other….it’s just different cultures.
On the ideas of schools, as I may have mentioned earlier secondary schools are not free and all students have to pay fees to go to high school. Some don’t have enough and have to wait a number of years to accumulate all the money before they can go back. Some turn to other means of making money: prostitution. Some are sponsored by NGOs; some have community sponsors. Imagine not being able to receive high school education? Imagine the drive that it would take to wait a few years in order to pay for two terms of school….Would I even go back or would I just give up? We are so privileged to have free education. Please know this. It is a gift. The students that I have the privilege of teaching absorb so much information and still crave to learn more. They want to be educated because the divide between education and lack of education is vast. Again, knowledge is power. I was talking to my teaching partner today and she was telling me that where she comes from people who aren’t educated don’t know about HIV or how it’s transmitted and prevented. Yet, HIV is a huge problem there. She says that they need to be taught, but who is going there and who can supply the funds for education?
Again there are a lot of thoughts going through my head and mostly likely not translating accurately to this blog, but here it is anyway.
This weekend Amit, Stu, Nat, Becks and I went to Masai Mara. This is one of the national parks of Kenya and is located in the Rift Valley Province in the southwest side of Kenya (look it up on a map if that’s what you fancy). It took 6 hours to drive there and it ws great to be out of the city so that we could experience some of the countryside of Kenya. It is beautiful as the fields are so lush. After leaving Nairobi we past through Central Province and then entered the Rift Valley Province. As our van took a corner the rift valley stretched before us and there was a ‘ahhh’ made in unison by all of the Canadians. It was breathtaking. There are big lush hills descending down into this vast valley of little farm plots and interspersed forest areas. We made a stop at a lookout point to take some pictures and some gift shop owners tried to convince us to buy their overpriced goods. They were beautiful but definitely marked up for the unsuspecting mazungos (“whites”).
The road to Masai Mara is SO bumpy and is littered with potholes. They are so common and the road is only ‘finished’ for pretty much one lane of traffic, that we spent most of the time drive on a vertical angle with half the van on the shoulder and half on the ‘road’. Good thing none of us get too carsick (other than Rebecca, but I think that she is getting pretty used to the Kenyan van trips).
The park itself is beautiful and it is definitely the classic ‘African’ plain: flat grasslands with a solo umbrella tree jetting into the seemingly endless blue sky. We stayed in Flamingo Camp which is located just beside the park in a mountainous area which reminds me of Austrian hills. We stayed in a tabin sort of thing. (i.e. 3 walls are wood and the door is a canvas tent…only 2 single beds fit inside)
On Saturday we spent 3-4 hours on safari in the park. We drive around in a van that has the roof come off so that we can stand and take pictures. It’s also incredibly bumpy so by the end of our weekend and having spent a total of probably 18-20 in the van, my body felt like jello. (It’s like after you swim in the ocean and your body feels like it is moving back and forth.)
We saw SO many animals and were able to drive right up to them. For most of them we were within 8-10 feet. We saw a male lion, lionesses, elephants, zebras, impalas, giraffes, topis, cheetahs, secretary birds, crusted craines, velvet monkeys, etc. I can’t load the pictures on here yet but there are so many and they’re really good…so I’ll try to put them up here soon.
The sky is so beautiful and so big! And to be honest I spent a lot of time in silence (other than our random outbursts of singing and Stu and I playing the ‘I Statement’ game with Amit cringing and moping about like an emo kid). The song that kept going through my head was Newboys ‘He Reigns’…I haven’t listened to this song in a while …specifically the lyrics that kept coming up were ‘…it’s the song of the forgiven rising from the African plain…’ what a beautiful picture. God’s splendor and perfection of His creation were so evident to me as we drove through the park.
It was fantastic and I kept having to remind myself (and everyone else!) that we were actually ON a real Safari on the plains of east Africa. A once in a lifetime experience. Or…perhaps the beginning of more trips on safari because I may have more trips to Kenya.
The other thing is that in this area there are many Massai people. This tribe of people are goat, sheep and cow farmers. The men wear brilliant red and blue cloth over their shoulders and cover themselves all the way down to their ankles. They are a warrior tribe and at the camp we were staying at we met a guy named James who is part of the Massai tribe. On Saturday night he showed us his spear that he carries with him. The spear that he has used to kill 2 lions….crazy, he even let me hold his necklace that has a huge lion’s tooth. He also carries around a club and a machete.
So there is more to this trip but I’m running out of time here and as they say ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ (Julia- I’m doing your quote a day thing). Um, so I’ll end here. I hope that the spring is great in Canada!