Rangi house with raised platforms for drying grains

Dry riverbed

Rangi land riverbed (dried up), cattle cross in the distance

Just the tree. This is in Rangi land but the oreteti tree (a kind of ficus) is sacred to the Maasai because they say when you cut it milk and blood comes out, both substances which are of high value to the Maasai. When you cut a ficus's leaves they secrete a white glue like liquid, and cutting the bark, the sap is red. Hence, the Maasai do not use this tree for anything that involves cutting it in any way.

An oreteti tree (Maasai name), site of the Rangi goat sacrifice. Far left: our super awesome cook with the funny hats

Rangi House and young boy

Mud bricks drying

Maize cobs drying on a house

Rangi homes and small plots

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