Masai Mara

Moja (1st), Decemba--i yie yie it's decemba!

This past week Wednesday to Friday we went to Masai Mara National Park for 3ish days. This was our last K-sponsored trip, the rest of our traveling we do is on our own. 3 of our professors came with us, Roseanne, Lillian, and Fred. I don’t think it’s the biggest national park in Kenya, but it’s the one that all the tourists want to go to because it’s supposed to be the best. The park is south of Nairobi about 3 hours drive and filled with all kinds of animals…the heart of Lion King. Hey, I found out the other day there is an actual place called Pride Rock, you know the place where the lions live in Lion King, it’s in Lake Naivasha about an hour away from Nairobi…I really wanna go.

Anyhow, in Masai Mara we did nothing but eat really delicious food, hang out at our “campsite” and go on game drives. It was so so so so much fun and I wished we could have stayed at least 2 more days, but I guess it’s expensive (not like K’s making a profit out of me going to Kenya or anything, I found out the other day tuition for international students at the University of Nairobi is something like 2,500 US dollars…and I’m paying K’s regular tuition price to be here? Anyway, that’s a rant for another day)

First we arrived at our “hotel” in the afternoon on Wednesday and got our “tents”. Ok, they were technically tents but, have you ever seen a tent that had a bathroom, shower and electricity? The bed was really comfy, they folded back your blankets in the evening and gave us all hot water bottles to keep us warm at night. We went to dinner at the lodge which was 4 courses of basically gourmet food-salad, soup, main course, dessert, with cheese and crackers and fruit salad at the end. If we stayed any longer than we did, we all would’ve gained 10 pounds because every meal was like that, and delicious so you wanted to eat it all.

In the evening we went on our first game drive, which consists of driving around the mara in our Land Cruiser with Juma, the same driver we’ve had for our other trips (we requested him for all our other trips after he took us to Mombasa and we all made friends with him) and looking at the animals we can see. There were little doors that opened on top of the Land Cruisers for standing up and picture taking and once we figured out that we could ride sitting on top of the Land Cruiser, it was really fun. How many times do you get to ride around on top of a car with the breeze and the sun and all kinds of animals? The path was also really hilly, so it was kind of a roller coaster too, adding to the excitement. Juma has taken groups to the Mara maybe 15 times so he’s a great tour guide, knew where to find all the animals and could tell us all about them.

We saw so many animals: all kinds of antelope, gazelles, impalas, élan, topis, wildebeest, zebras, ostriches, bushbucks, hippos, storks, herons, baboons, jackals, hyenas, and my favorites-twigas and tembos (giraffes and elephants)!!! There were probably a lot more that I’m forgetting. We missed out on the simbas (lions) even though we searched hard for them. Oh well, it was so fantastic and yes, looked just like the Lion King-hey, that’s most people’s relation to the way Africa looks. The plants and trees were great too, we kept passing these giant thorn bushes that had 2 inch long brilliant white thorns and giant dark black berries on them. We saw a herd of elephants taking a mudbath about 30 feet away from us! It was so cool to see the animals in a relatively untouched (I mean, apart from the Land Cruisers driving around) environment, rather than in a zoo, just doing their own thing. It made me really want to be a scientist and be able to study them.

In the evenings we ate dinner, hung out on our "porches," played cards, chatted with other people staying there, played Capture the flag, looked at stars after they turned the electricity off at midnight-clearest, brightest sky I've ever seen, ate the best brownies and chocolate sauce ever-or maybe it tasted that good because i haven't had anything like it in a long time, played with the bushbucks that hung out all around the campsite and were kind of like puppies but shyer, sat around a campfire and listened to a Kenyan guy play Bob Marley songs on a guitar.

We also went on a long game drive all day Thursday, it was gorgeous out and really warm and great breezes sitting on top of the car the whole day. Part of our reason for being there apart from checking out the animals was to study the relation between tourists and the Maasai people whose land the park is on. In a way, it helps to preserve their lands because they still can herd and graze their cattle and move freely all over the land, in and out of the park, and even between Kenya and Tanzania without a passport, wherever the grass is good because they’re a pastoral tribe. But mostly, it just commodifies their way of life and turns it into a circus act, tourist attraction, it was pretty sickening at times. Like Thursday afternoon, we visited a Maasai village where they showed us some of their traditional dances, gave us a tour of their houses and village and then we went to their market. Although it was interesting to see, we know they get paid just to show tourists this stuff and it felt so wrong being there, just that my presence as another package tourist there was destroying something. I guess I’m being kind of vague in the details right now, I’m going to write a paper on it in a week, so I might write more on this later. I got what I think will be a fantastic picture of the Maasai starting to come out of the gate of their village to greet us and right at that moment a plane flew really low right overhead-there’s an airstrip in the park for the super wealthy to come visit that way. It perfectly depicted these contradictions.

Patrick, Fred and I had a good conversation that night at dinner about all of this and the way that tourism can be executed in a positive way that actually benefits the community living there rather than exploits them, like if the hotel we stayed at was owned by local Maasai rather than the elite Kenyatta family-one of the richest families in Kenya. At least it’s Kenyan, not European, but still, it’s not much better. What I saw though, was some Maasai warriors dancing for us tourists like a circus act, being paid peanuts for it. I clapped along reluctantly like they expect us to, pretending I enjoyed it and wasn’t noticing all the contradictions and the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. It’s dehumanizing. Yes, they get paid for doing this, but they’re not doing the naming-ceremony dance because a baby is being named, they’re doing it because we paid to go on this tour. And it’s money that only gets them by, doesn’t sustain them for the long run, and which continues to keep them down and unable to get ahead. This is not positive development, it’s exploitation. And Fred said, this happens to the Maasai and wouldn’t to other tribes because they’re one of the minorities, and no one cares about them.

All in all though, it was a really really really good trip. It made me think more deeply about some things I’ve been considering a lot already during this experience. I am learning so much, but Kenya’s hard, it’s really hard seeing all of this injustice and harsh reality that you hear about. I’m having kind of a hard time even writing this, even though I’ve hardly gotten into the details. It’s sometimes hard to justify even having a good time here when there is so much unfairness. How can one be satisfied with their own life when there are other people right next to you being so used? Everywhere, it’s everywhere I go-in Nairobi, in the Mara, in the rural villages, in the slums, in the second-hand markets, in the communities like Karen that the white people use to try to close themselves off from facing the realities of the severe injustice. What is my place in being here? Do I even belong here? What am I doing here besides supporting an unfair system? I know I am learning, but is it enough? Can I even do anything to help change this system and these legacies and can my place as an American be used to help change this?