Climbing the Literal Mountain

Thursday I had another great day of Swahili lessons. We had our fist test this afternoon and I think I did pretty well. I'm really starting to love the language. One great thing about Swahili is that even if you don't understand it you can still read it. This is because consonant pronunciation almost never changes and vowels absolutely never do. This comes in especially handy when we are visiting villages, like I did on Friday.

The village was called Choza and the people were very nice. It wasn't very big, people wise, but it was huge land wise. It took us about 20 minutes to hike from the Church area to the nearest home area. We were able to go inside a house, for the first time. Maasai live very humbly. There houses are quite small, but there is plenty of room. The walls are made of mud bricks, or manure, and are reinforced with wooden branches. In the house we visited, there was a kitchen, a sitting room, and the bedroom. The kitchen had many pots and pans, a water basin, and a fire pit. The sitting room had, I think, a few chairs. It was hard to see because there were no windows except for a very small (probably 2"x2") window in the bedroom looking out over the cow pasture. I don't know what the bed was made out of, but on top there was a wooden mat of some sort, and it was very comfortable. Once we got out of the house we all sat on mats outside for a while, while PH talked to the elders. As we sat there, a flock of chickens went by and one unlucky chick walked within reaching distance of Luka. Luka grabbed it and was about to hand it to Kim when the mother hen saw what was going on and freaked out! She spread out her wings, puffed up her feathers, and charged Luka. And poor Luka, who was sitting in a very awkward position, could only roll over in defense. He let go of the chick (and by let go I mean he threw it 10 feet) and the hen backed away. It was one of the funniest things I have ever seen, and quite surprising. I would have never expected a chicken to be so hostile.

The service was nice but the church was PACKED! The building was a large hut with a thatched palm frond roof. The bench we (Joel, Jesse, JoAnna, Kim, and myself) had to sit on was the single most uncomfortable bench I have ever sat on in my life! It was very small and hard. I had to sort of straddle Kim while a Masai boy sort of straddled me, and an elder had his legs smashed up against mine... it was awkward to say the least. We were very relieved when the service ended and we had a chance to walk around during the service auction. The after service supper consisted of rice, beans, and goat.

After the meal I went and played with the village children. Joel, JoAnna, and Jesse were too full to come and play. And Kim... well Kim doesn't like children. Whenever a child comes near she looks at them as if she is staring at an alien. She turns very cold and sort of ignores the child. Its very sad, and quite frankly a shame because most of these children already have a fear of white people and I don't think acting like she does is going to help anything. I just don't understand how someone doesn't like children. But I played with the children and had a great time! Bubbles are just an insane amount of fun. And the stickers were a hit. At first they weren't sure what the stickers were. But once they figured it out, they snatched the sheets away from me and sprinted off into the distance. By the time I finally caught one of the little girls who had taken a whole sheet, half of them were gone. Each child had, roughly, 20 stickers on them. They had stickers everywhere. On their forehead, cheeks, hands, clothes, shoes, trees, chickens... whatever.

On the way home we stopped and picked up a few mangoes and papayas for a snack later that night while we watched movies and played checkers.

This morning, we decided we were all going to go and climb the mountain behind LJS. PH drove us into town and by 9:00 we were on our way. Now I enjoy exercise, I play racquetball a few times I week, I love tennis, weightlifting is okay, blah blah blah... but if you've met me you know I'm not built for long distances. I have a body structure reminiscent of a 2008 Honda Element. Needless to say, the four hour trek up the mountain was going to be a challenge. Of course the second we got in the car Kim started complaining that we were going to slow her down. She does this a lot, and it is really starting to get on my nerves. And whenever she messes up, or slows me down, (like in Swahili lessons... cough cough) she makes some lame excuse. But back to the story... So the second we got out of the car Kim just takes off at a break neck speed. Joel, JoAnna, Jesse, Omega, Kidege, and myself look at each other like, "whoa what is she doing?". So Kidege catches up and walks (and by walks I mean sprints) with her. Meanwhile, the rest of us stay behind and have a very lovely hike. But the challenge of the mountain proved to be too great for me. After about an hour and a half I had to call it quits. I felt bad for turning around, but I didn't want to slow the girls down, they were going just a little to fast for me (at this point Kim and poor Kidege were way ahead, we couldn't even see them). Omega said he was fine with leaving so we walked back down the mountain. The walk back down was, as expected, much easier. At first we thought we were going to just wait for the bus to show up but we decided to walk into Morogoro instead.