View from inside cooking area looking out at drying maize cobs, stones for grinding grains, and gourds for sepaerating grains from dust and sheaths

Rangi woman cooking millet ugali

Kondoa. The third and final village we visited, was yet another completely different environment. The Rangi are agriculturalists like the Chagga but are living lives of less development (for better to worse). Houses here are built of sundried mud bricks and long and low to the ground, designed to keep cool where the Maasai's are designed to keep warm. At Kondoa we had armed guards posted around our campsite, for protection from something they didn't exactly say. Either thieves, hyenas, lions, or all of the above.

Larissa, Tamiko and myself (photographing obviously) heading out to see hippos in our hired dugout canoe

Sunset from the campsite at the lake midway to Kondoa

This is a terrible picture of me but the only evidence of my raggedy ann braid/ dreadlock hairstyle I sported for about a week unstil the braids in the back all fell out due to my too short hair.

I realize I look high but I think it's the self portrait inside a tent using a flash to blame. I also lightened bits of my face in photoshop to lessen some of the extreme shadows. It looks wierd. I'm not very good with photoshop.

Hippos (viewed from a dugout canoe)

This is really grainy because it is zoomed all the way in to a Raw image. I onlt had a wide angle lens, not the best for photographing wildlife.

Fisherman in a dugout canoe. We found these guys while we were walking around the lake we camped at on the way to our third field village. They offered to take us out in their canoes to see hippos and not without apprehension, we accepted.

The goat to be sacrificed (not to be morbid) and Lesikar's elder brother. (Lesikar being the Maasai husband of Gemma, the woman who runs the program)

Washed out roads near Eluai

Acacia on the savannah

View from above the Olpul (medicinal goat sacrifice) site near Eluai

Maasai beehive

Beaders

Beaders

Beaders

Maasai Beaders. The Massai women from the area gather in this place everyday to sing and bead jewelry for themselves, their husbands or lovers, and to sell.

We spent a full day working and learning from these women and learned (sort of) how to bead some of the maasai jewelry and what the colours mean.

Sunset at Eluai

View from Eluai

The source of water for the village of Eluai (Maasai) about a three hours walk from the village.

View toward Ngorongoro crater from Eluai

Eluai

Maasai building a fire boyscout style (George and Lesikar)

Grazing Maasai cattle

Medicinal soup made of wood, water, and goat intestines and blood. Soup made with sacrificed goat the the Maasai ceremony Olpul to aid recovery of people after stresses such at childbirth or circumcision

Skinning the goat

Maasai (Arusha style) houses in Eluai.

Eluai is the Maasai homestead we took a three day field trip to following our trip to Machame (Kilimanjaro foothills). Eluai was around the same elevation as the previous village but an entirely different environment (obviously). From here you could see the eyes and hear hyenas howling around your tent at night. The Maasai from the area would gather here at night and have dances which we we lucky enough to participate in even, and the view was absolutely beautiful.

Man hauling straw on road between Machame and Arusha

Chagga man climbing up road

View from campsite in Kilimanjaro foothills, near Machame

River gorge bridge

Chagga woman crossing bridge between sections of villages higher up on the ridges

River flowing from Kilimanjaro

Larrissa looks down

Figures in the mist

Me in front of waterfall

Chagga home

I'm minding my own business at breakfast the other day, as the chuch tower in Ferneux Pelham instructs, and enjoying the usual breakfast of mango, avocado, something in between a tortilla and a pancake and english breakfast tea reflecting on my time here. I'm thinking 'wow this is a crazy place, I'll have so many stories to tell when I get back'. So I go down the hall to try my luck with the computer and it works, I'm pretty lucky, and I expect to get news of home and the normal goings on around Boulder, CO and perhaps a bit from back home, home Ontario. Maybe I'll hear that mum has found a place to live? But no, I don't get normalcy, I get chaos. Luke has written an email whilst tripping on mushrooms or something and is raving about his cd player's personality, Aviv is working 20 km away from the front lines of Israel's war which has recently intensified and she also seems a touch delerius, something about an argentinian man with dark eyes and square palms. And if that's not enough, my little brother, whom I still refer to as my little brother, has gone off and married a lesbian in a gothic chapel in Las Vegas because he thought 'it would be fun'...

I'm in Tanzania. Big deal. Maybe I really AM an island of sanity in an insane world. But just when I'm thinking I have no such stories to tell to tempt the imaginations of such crazy people my fellow young anthropologists and I set out to Machame, a village up in the foothills of Mt. Kilimanjaro (despite my recent proximity to which I still have not seen, it is shrouded in secrecy.. or clouds or something). Machame is a Chagga village, the Chagga people are traditionally agriculturalists and the enemy of the Maasai. Now they are quite developed being one of the first to me missionized and westernized by the colonial explorers. Nevertheless the Chagga were great people, one elder, named Sho, came with a sort of council of various village elite to relate to us stories of how the Chagga system used to work and almost anything he said he had to argue about twice as long with the council. The village is up in the foothills as I said and it's quite the tropical jungle up there. As such there were more mosquitoes and I am no longer immune to their bites it seems although I have only been bitten once. If I start to rave as if from fever, send doctors. In any case we went on a number of hikes while up there to various rivers and beuatiful waterfalls but once particular hike took us to my new favorite place. Down in one of the gorges (Machame is sort of up on a ridge) we came to this bridge. This particlular bridge was right out of Indiana Jones, no side rails, rotting planks, laid across two huge tree trunks just wide enough apart to fall through, and at least 50 feet above the rocky river below. It was the best thing I've ever seen. Crossing the bridge (I have pictures to proove it) I now feel like a proper anthropologist, initiated by tropical jungle hiking to remote villages and crossing perilous river's on shaky slippery bridges. At night we participated in traditional Chagga dances that are in slow circles, everyone's shoulder's clasped,a nd "sampled" the local brew. The local brew is a strange alcoholic concoction of millet and plantain, which is very very remotely like gitty beer. It is served in a calabash (gourd cup) about the size of a large stein which you cannot put down until you've finished, hence "sampled". Today we're setting off to a Maasai village where local brew means goats blood (wish my stomach good luck). Beat that marriage in Vegas! So I'm having a grand time, and I feel like an anthropologist in the way that no degree can provide. I miss you all but will see you soon and regail you with pictures and stories, which I do indeed have.

Congratulations to Julian, I'm looking forward to meeting my new sister-in-law. Hope it works out for you. Though seeing as you've married a lesbian I doubt if your marriage is consumated. Good luck with that.

And to Aviv, BE SAFE! Watch out for whistling noises getting louder, maybe you should dig a bomb shelter or somthing for you and your argentinian friend. But honestly, hope you're having a good time albeit amidst the war.

Have fun, be safe, don't drink too much of the local brew. Cheers,

Morgan

Chagga house and home garden

Village roads in the Kilimanjaro foothills

Sunflower seeds drying near Machame

Waterfall trekking group. Left to right; Heid, Emma, Lekishon, Larissa, George, Tamiko, and me

Arusha style home (circular, mud and dung walls and thatched roof)

Waarusha village on slopes of Mt. Meru

Lekishon: Maasai warrior, woodland guide and ready for the future

Behind the waterfall

Waterfall

Steep, slippery and muddy trail climbing down Mt. Meru

Misty trees on Mt. Meru

Mist around a church on the slopes of Mt. Meru

Chagga woman carrying plantain leaves to feed cattle