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