Hadza in Tanzania

           Imagine a world in which there is no property and obligatory sharing is a thing. Where hoarding isn't an issue because you take only what you need when you need it, and there is an unlimited amount of resources because you aren't killing the environment with unsustainable living habits. Imagine being at peace because you live 100% in the present moment, not stressing about even the next minute to come. This is the way the Hadzabe of Tanzania live.

Climbing a Bau Bau Tree

           Many may have heard references to "backwards bush people" in their lives, but I will attest that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that these people chose to live by is far from backwards. In fact, I would argue that they've got it all right. They are the only society to have never experienced a famine! Tell me they aren't doing life the way life is meant to be done!
           Having finished Ishmael by Daniel Quinn while on my excursion into the bush, my perspective on "developed" societies has altered drastically. According to Quinn, Mother Culture tells us that in order to live a good life, we have to be in control of our surroundings at all times. This is to say that rather than going out and finding what there is to eat in nature, one plants their own food. And with development, one opens up a grocery store with foods brought in from all over the place. That way, when you want an orange, even if there are none on your farm, there are some in the store. You have access to whatever you want, whenever you want so long as you have the means to purchase it. Not only does this put into our heads that we are superior to all other life forms because we have the power, it also creates class distinctions between those who can have what they want when they want, and those who cannot. Money becomes the priority in this lifestyle because Mother Culture tells us that's what we need to survive. Ishmael makes a statement against this consumer culture in which we are so willing to kill the earth that we claim to love so much because of this human desire to "develop." Physically being with the Hadzabe and experiencing a semblance of what it feels like to live the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was eye-opening to the legitimacy of Daniel Quinn's book (which by the way, I highly recommend reading).

One morning in particular, we had the opportunity to split into small groups and go out with the men on hunting missions. Walking through the expansiveness of the savanna was overwhelming to say the least. The natural landmarks of trees and bushes were used to navigate our way through all the brush. The men carried bows and arrows that we'd helped them to make the previous day (by carving a tree branch, and chewing on giraffe tendon to use as glue for the feathers). Upon spotting something in the distance that none of us students saw, the man would take off his shoes and run off as we crouched down as quietly as we could. Obviously, we hindered his hunting experience greatly by being slightly clumsy, loud, and very visible, but the man whom my group walked with was able to hit a guinea fowl and capture all of her baby chicks (we couldn't find the guinea fowl or arrow used to hit her). Although unsettling to me to eat the babies, c'est leur vie, so sure enough, they were roasted up and eaten like chicken nuggets.

TORN UP LEGS post-bush hunting experience

          In Tanzania, it is law to attend school through primary years. Several Hadza people continue to attend school even after they've completed the compulsory years. A conversation that we had with the community however, demonstrated that regardless of whether or not someone attended school for 16+ years, they always returned to the bush because their quality of life there was so great. To me, this legitimizes how they live so much more. It is not because of a lack of education or knowledge that there is another way, it is completely willingly that the Hadza chose to hunt and gather as their livelihood. Although I'm not going to drop out of school and join the Hadzabe in the Yaeda Valley anytime soon, I highly respect their lives and believe that there are a few lessons that can be taken from them.

-Take only what you need, in the moment that you need it.
-Respect everyone as equals, understanding that everyone contributes something.
-Appreciate your culture, the values that you've learned, use them to be happy.
-Stay stress free!
-Remember that the benefits of "development" are subjective.
-Living a good life is not synonymous with having the ability to get whatever you want whenever you want it.

           There are so many other aspects of this experience that I could discuss, but I will conclude with only one more point. As I am a linguistics major, it would be unnatural for me to not at least mention the fact that the language of the Hadza peoples is linguistically different from any other, indicating their seclusion and lack of influence from other societies. In addition to hominid bones being found in their valley, this further leads to the potentiality of them being the origin of all mankind as we know it today. I feel honored to have been walking on the land that was very possibly the originating area of our ancestry.
           I highly encourage you to do a little google search of the Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania as what I've written here is only a cursory glance at this fascinating group of people. There are so many other aspects I could have touched upon such as their sense of independence at such a young age, or the way that women have all the same rights as men. I wish I could go on but I will leave it at this for now!
         

For those who are interested on a more personal note, my 21st birthday (February 13th) was an ultimate success and one that I will never forget. How many people get to say that they brought in their 21st year being sung to by an indigenous East African community and new friends, complete with Mt. Kilimanjaro lager and cakes with
arrows as representatives of the big 2 1? I was absolutely taken aback by the enormity of the moment, and even now cannot do justice to the experience. Everything about everything was amazing!




Siku Njema,
Beca

(P.S. This experience was made possible by DOROBO Safaris which although a for-profit organization, works very hard to establish a positive relationship with the Hadza, and help them to secure their land from being encroached upon by other communities. In conversation, the Hadza said that they were very happy to have us there because they were able to learn a lot from us and were so happy to teach us about their culture (DOROBO is worth googling as well to see the impacts they've had on the society)).

DOROBO Vehicle

Road Infrastructure

Life is all about the roads we decide to take. Are they gravely and bumpy or smooth sailing? When we come to forks, which direction do we chose to go in? How does whatever path we chose affect the rest of our lives? Some might say that the metaphor of life being a journey in which we all must travel is cliche, but it's referred to as such for valid reasons! I will take this opportunity to tell you about the array of roads I ventured on this week.
Being the first week of classes, I spent a lot of time getting to know my surroundings. For starters, driving into the Central Business District (CBD) of Nairobi to the United Kenyan Club (UKC), which is where I attend classes Monday-Thursday, takes about 30 minutes. The ride is relatively smooth and before long, I'm in my History of Modern Kenya and Gender Studies classes. For lunch one day, my friends and I set out to find Java (an American style cuisine). Although there are a few street lights throughout the CBD, they might as well not exist. For about 3 red light cycles, I watched the cars zoom right through them without a care in the world for the pedestrians waiting to cross. I couldn't help comparing it in my mind to New York City where the pedestrians truly own the road. That is not the case here at all. There was nothing we could do except wait for literally all of the cars to pass through all of our turns to walk until there were no cars left. Mind you there were at least 20 people waiting to cross, but no one took the initiative to forge a path for the legitimate fear of being run over. To make the situation even better, there are police waiting anxiously to capture people jay-walking. I say capture because best-case scenario, you bribe the police officer to let you go, worst-you sit in jail for a day waiting for trial, and then ultimately get fined 500 Ksh (Kenyan shillings) ($5.00).
After classes are finished for the day, we head back to our compound, which is in the outskirts of Nairobi in a neighborhood called Karen. This trip takes about an hour and a half due to the extensive amount of traffic leaving the city at 4:30 pm. Crazily enough, it would take twice as long without Njou (our driver) who asserts himself into the flow of cars quite seamlessly. To say that driving in Kenya is aggressive would be an understatement. There are few stop signs (and when there are, they're ignored), many roundabouts, and most places do not have lines on the roads. Now this could be an example of underdevelopment, but I don't see it that way. Personally, I think it's amazing that people are able to travel on the roads and maintain some semblance of structure without heavily enforced traffic laws. Besides the ban on jay-walking of course.
This week, after finishing my classes one day, I took a trip into town with my friend Sarah to go to Naukumat, the local equivalent to Walmart. The store carries everything from washing machines and refrigerators to nail polish and Lays potato chips. Unlike at Walmart however, the security guards at this store actually waved a wand over me and checked inside my bag, prior to letting me enter, as all the security guards in front of large stores and banks do in Nairobi. The walk into town took about 45 minutes, and it was all downhill.  Literally. The trip back up however, called for a taxi as I had purchased too many things to try carrying back up. (Aka, nail polish and chips).
This weekend, Saint Lawrence University (SLU) offered an optional trip to Mount Longonot, which obviously everybody was eager to partake in! This drive there was about 3 hours long, and provided for ample time to catch up on all the latest American Hits (Thanks Spotify)! I also learned that sometimes when there's an accident in front of you stopping traffic, the appropriate response is to drive off of the road to get around it. A two lane highway very quickly became a four lane highway when on either side people drove down a hill onto the grass below. Another interesting component of highways is that there are random speed-bumps that are important to look out for.
Now this wouldn't be a complete blog post without an account of a crazy hike I partook in. After having just made it to the top of the 9,108 ft volcano, my friend Monica and I began our descent back down. It was very steep and very dusty, and a man kept stumbling into me. I went to the side so that he could pass, thinking he was simply rude and in a hurry to get down, or perhaps he was drunk (as many people had been drinking on the top of the rim), but his friends grabbed onto him, telling him he wasn't steady enough to descend and he needed to sit down. Monica and I went down as fast as we could, hoping to avoid having him behind as again. As we were running down a less steep portion, a man carrying a stretcher passed us hastily, making the noise of an ambulance. We spoke about how highly impractical it was to carry that stretcher up because the hike took over 3 hours and it would be nearly impossible to carry someone down on a stretcher with as steep as the mountain is.
As I write this post however, it seems unimaginable to not acknowledge that as we were arriving at the bottom of the mountain, a man from Nairobi was passing away at the top due to complications with his breathing, which I came to know as I was writing this post. The following news article provides a more in-depth account of the issues that occurred in terms of the Kenya Wildlife Service Rangers' response
http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2016/02/07/nairobi-businessman-dies-during-mt-longonot-hike_c1290570 I thought that it was important to include this because it touches upon the lack of a helicopter response, and further in the comments section, people's opinions on the matter. Most notably: "if it had been a white man, a helicopter would have been found."
Although I originally began this post with the intent of portraying Kenyan road infrastructure in a life lesson kind of way, deeper meaning has been found with the loss of a life because of the lack of infrastructure within the wildlife service. I cannot be certain that the man stumbling into me was the same man who lost his life yesterday, but I can be certain that prior to making assumptions, it's vitally important to be present in the moment and make informed decisions. If I hadn't been clouded by being annoyed, and if Monica and I had stopped to see that everything was okay, who knows that help couldn't have been sent sooner because who knows how long his friends waited to ask for it. At the time, I didn't think anything of it, and even now I'm not certain what I would have done if confronted with the situation again, but I know that life is all about the roads we decide to take, and I will try to be more cognizant of the one's I'm choosing.

Beca

Rural Home Stay

"Are you in the moment?" is a thing my friend Emily and I would ask each other this summer as we hiked and camped our way along the coasts of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. We recognized a tendency that we had early on our adventure of allowing our minds to wander off of the path we were on at the time. Rather than experiencing the moments we were in, we escaped to places that we'd been before, trying to recreate memories and places we wanted to go, envisioning futures that were not ours to create.
Another vital mantra that we had was "deep and mindful breaths and steps" which came in handy particularly as we were scaling down an unmarked trail in an attempt to reach a place by the name of Amethyst Cove. From the get-go, I was terrified. It was steep, rocky, muddy, and unfamiliar. As we neared the bottom of the cliff I began to tear up from straight up fear of slipping, but Emily reminded me to take deep and mindful breaths and we made it to the bottom. When I took my first step onto the beach, I told her that she needed to call the Coast Guard because there was no way in hell I was climbing back up that cliff. I then went off to the purported amethysts and tried to really appreciate the moment for exactly what it was. I was there on that beach in Canada with one of my best friends, having an adventure of a lifetime, and nothing else in my life mattered. We reconvened, piled our backpacks with rocks, increasing the weight by about 10 pounds, and bolted back up before it got dark. Despite the fact that I was grateful to have had the experience, I swore that I would never climb down that mountain, or anything similar to it, ever again.

Little did I know that less than a year later, I would be in the Highlands of Central Kenya with the opportunity to set out for a waterfall with my host siblings. The degree of difficulty of the hike was the same as it had been in Canada, except I was surrounded by people speaking in Kikuyu and walking ten times faster than I could, and I was without anyone positively reinforcing me or reminding me to be present. At one rock in particular, I had the conversation with myself in my head of "why am I doing this, why do I always think I can do these kinds of things, I'm scared, I can't breathe..." Etc. And then I just had to tell myself "No. This is your moment. These are all your moments. Stay present and aware. You've got this." And this time when I made it to my destination, I didn't swear I would never leave out of fear of the return. I appreciated all the sceneries I had seen on my way and anxiously anticipated the many things I would notice the second time around. I recognized in myself that I am going to do a million more things in this life that may terrify me, but I'm going to keep doing them anyways­.
But let me backtrack: this past week I had the opportunity to stay with a family in the rural area of Central Kenya. I had a younger brother of 6 years old,a sister of 10 years old, a sister of 22 and a girl named Jane who might as well have been my sister, aged 22 as well. My mom and dad were not home much due to their strenuous work schedules, but I understand the fact that they've got to work hard to make ends meet. However, from conversations I had with the girls while washing clothes by hand daily, or mopping the floor bent over dragging a rag, I was able to ascertain a lot about Kikuyu views and values. Something that I found was equally important as their answers to my questions was the questions that they chose to ask me. For instance, "In America, would people stare at me if I  walked down the street?" which I later learned was a very real issue for me in rural Kenya.

The cultural differences of living in another society were not as shocking to me as they were to many of my peers. However, there are a few important aspects I would like to touch upon. One of which being gender roles. Although different in every family, there was a general consensus that the fathers of the family expected to be taken care of regardless of whether or not the women were working equally as hard throughout the day. To demonstrate with a personal anecdote, it was about 10:30 pm and my dad had just gotten home. I was already in bed, but I ran out to greet him because it was my last night with the family. As soon as I saw him, the first thing he said is "I haven't taken dinner yet. I would like eggs too" and then he walked into his room. Dinner was already prepared so I simply had to warm it up, but I had to make eggs as well and I brought it all out to him at around 10:45 pm where he was seated in front of the tv. The entire week I was there, I did not see my father take a single foot into the kitchen!
Another concept that I would like to touch upon is the "white savior" complex. In magazines such as National Geographic, there is often a white man exploring the wild African nature and in college classes, I was taught the ways in which this was detrimental. However, after having spent a week being constantly referred to as "Mzungu" (white person), stared at everywhere I went, and personally targeted in town, I realize this concept is not perpetuated solely by magazines. There are many Kenyans, specifically the Kikuyus, who believe all white people are rich and are 'godly' as one student was told. Sitting on the grass of a hospital, my host sister informed me that we weren't supposed to, but nobody would say anything because I was there. This was extremely uncomfortable for me, and being a women who would some day like to return to Kenya, I felt overwhelmed with the idea that I would always be seen in that way. One student described it as feeling like a celebrity, which was cool at first, but once you think about why, it's much more difficult to be okay. Random people on the street would run up wanting to touch us, just like if you saw your favorite celebrity walking around downtown.
My host sister explained to me that she understood I was a student just like her and didn't have a plethora of money to give away, but many people would not see it in that way. Especially since $1 is equivalent to 100 Kenyan Shillings and you can buy a pair of shoes at a store similar to Payless for 300 shillings. $3 for a pair of shoes that in America would cost at minimum $20. Without a doubt, we have poverty in America, but the extent of our poverty, and the government's attempt to aid those in need, makes it significantly more difficult to equate the two situations.
However, I would like to also discuss daily life for my family to demonstrate the ways in which the society was structured from my experiences. Every morning and evening, the cows are milked providing enough for the family to have chai and to sell to the market. There is no need for a refrigerator as the milk is drank and sold as it's brought in. Secondly, no one has an excess of clothes because they're washed almost every day and there is no need. If you are a female, the day is filled primarily with straightening the house, washing dishes and clothes, and preparing meals. It's highly repetitive and tedious work, but I respect the women beyond belief. After a week, I was physically and mentally exhausted, and I cannot imagine having to do it for much longer, let alone for my entire life. I suppose the muscles would get used to it, but I don't think anyone can ever get used to the heat of the sun! I didn't have very much experience on the farm itself as there was someone hired to tend to it. I did have a few opportunities to milk a cow and cut the grass with a single blade when the girls were free to go outside with me, but I wasn't comfortable alone with the man hired and the girls were constantly preoccupied. The men's work  on the farm however seemed equally as strenuous based solely on observation.
The most magical part of the entire experience overall was seeing how happy everyone seemed

to be. Having only been there for a week, it's hard to make any assertive statements generalizing their lives, but the entire society seemed to be heavily rooted in Christianity, allowing them the belief that everything was exactly how it should be and so they weren't consumed with worry. My family worked hard and provided for their children opportunities to succeed, and as my host-mom put it, "to have more and be better," the same goal most  Western parents have for their children.
In closing, spending a week within a rural family allowed me the opportunity to learn about myself, the Kikuyu society, and several cultural differences which are all interrelated. Despite the scatterdness of my thoughts, I hope that I have given you something to reflect on. Gender roles and the concept of whiteness are two things that I will be choosing to focus on throughout the next four months, and as my thoughts formulate I'll be sure to share! In addition, there are many things, especially concerning the history of the Kikuyu people that I didn't speak about that I may later as I continue to do more research. Anyways, I'll keep you posted!

Siku Njema!!
Beca