hakuna nyazi...

Photos: 1) interviewing Maasai elders in Kimana Group Ranch. 2) leading a Passover seder and enthusiastically explaining the seder plate.

I wrote this yesterday but the internet wasn't working...

The madness called directed research (DR) has begun!

I am in the wildlife ecology DR with Kiringe. Our study is on rangeland conditions and trends in Kuku Group Ranch (the group ranch next to ours, Kimana) and how they affect the local communities, especially the Maasai in the group ranch. Every day we wake up really early to leave by 7:00 – it gets really hot out in the field so the earlier we leave, the earlier we get back and avoid the hotter parts of the day! Half of our fieldwork is monitoring vegetation. There are 12 of us in the DR group, but for fieldwork we divide into smaller groups, either singles or doubles, with local guides. For vegetation monitoring, each group samples 21 points along a 2km transect. The first day it took us all day, but now we are in a better rhythm and can finish before lunch. The other half of our fieldwork is interviewing the people in the community. Most of the interviews are with members of the group ranch to see how they perceive range condition changes. The other interviews are with our key informants, Maasai elders. I had the great pleasure of doing this yesterday. I’d say it definitely made the top 5 days in Kenya list. Another student and I spent the whole day with Kiringe and a guide to translate. We had three discussion groups, each with three elders, in Mbirikani, Kuku, and Kimana group ranches. The elders are traditionally seen as the most knowledgeable people in the community and have clearly lived the longest, so we sought their opinions on changes in the group ranches. Each discussion group was very different. The first was in a church where a dust devil surrounded the building and rattled the roof. The second was in a school where a chicken, and later a goat, casually walked in and out with little reaction from us. The third was under the shade of an Acacia tree next to a cultural manyatta, and halfway through our discussion a tourist group arrived at the cultural manyatta so we heard the Maasai put on their “show” for the visitors. I won’t go into details on the information we collected because then this will turn in to a full on paper, but we learned some really interesting things and noted a lot of differences across the three group ranches.

All of our fieldwork has been exciting because it is so different from anything else I have done in my life. When I’m sitting on a small stool in a boma while interviewing a mama, I always think how even just a year ago I would have never imagined I’d be doing these things. I don’t even think I could have fully fathomed or understood life in Kenya and all of its complexities (and, truthfully, I guess I still don’t really!)

Yesterday on our way back from our interviews with the elders, it began to pour! The rainy season should have started by March, but the area is in a severe drought. During our interviews with the elders, they all agreed that this has been one of the worst droughts they have lived through. In general, wherever you go you see lots of livestock – cows, goats, sheep (collectively “shoats”), donkeys. The drought is so bad you can see how unhealthy these animals looks, especially the cows. They are so small and thin you can see their bones. During our fieldwork for DR we have come across wildlife that have died from the drought. Unlike back in the states (something we explain when we are interviewing people in the community when they want to know if problems here exist in the US), everyone’s primary source of livelihood depends on the land. So when it rains here, it is instant relief and happiness. And it poured like we have never seen here. Our so-called soccer field flooded with mud. A bunch of us romped around in the rain, making mud angels, shoving mud in each other’s faces. It rained so much that our driveway flooded with gooey mud. My DR group’s car got stuck in the mud this morning, so we had, in essence, a “mud day” (like a snow day!) Rather than taking a non-program day tomorrow as planned, my DR group had one today while the other groups went into the field. What a wonderful day of relaxation!

To back track quite a bit, on the 8^th, the night before DR began, I held a Passover seder, thanks to mom who sent a wonderful package with matzah, charoset ingredients, and a complete wooden Passover set. Everyone seemed to really enjoy it, both students and staff. I think I’ve developed a reputation here for being overly silly a lot, and that definitely applied during the seder. There are now a bunch of funny pictures and videos of me being incredibly Jewish, for example of me getting everyone to sing “dayenu” or waving around the wooden seder plate.

As Kiringe says, “Oh, it’s a marathon now! You’ll go crazy!” DR has taken over our lives. We unfortunately don’t see the other DR groups much because we are in the field all day and everyone has a lot of work to do at night or are in desperate need of sleep. There are only three weeks left of the semester, and it will definitely go fast with DR.