Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Masai Village

These pictures were taken at the Masai Village we visited. Elder and Sister Bishop with the young man who welcomed us. I think he did that simply because of his mastery of the English language.
The next is some of the young men doing one of their tribal dances. They seemed to only have two. One they would hop around in kind of a snake line of sorts and the other they took turns seeing who could jump the highest. They didn't seem to bend their legs much but they sure got some altitude when they went up.

Their village is built in a circle facing inwards and is surrounded by a woven willow fence that is to keep out the wild game The fence has various openings that their cattle enter through each evening. The cattle come in the same gate each evening and stay there, so obviously they leave a lot of dung lying around. This is good though as the huts are made by weaving willows together and then coating it with the dung. If the roof starts to leak they just pile on more dung.

This last picture is a reception line that was formed to congratulate the family members of a young woman who had just gone through a coming of age ritual. She wasn't there as she was trying to recover from the ordeal. The Masai are very proud of their cattle and eat only beef even with all the other abundant game surrounding them. They only kill those wild animals which threaten their livestock and I guess the other tribes that have livestock so that they can increase their own holdings. I assured them that we didn't own any cows. They have adapted some to the modern world as they had built a market area to display all the artifacts they wanted us to buy and made sure we each had an investment councilor assigned to encourage us to purchase something. Very persistent little devils.

2 comments:

Lori said...

It's so strange to see them in familiar clothing in unfamiliar places...

Bethany said...

I feel the same way. Seeing her in her old apron in some strange apartment. Crazy! It's like they photoshopped themselves in some Nat'l Geographic picture.