Friday we had our home stay party, which is a gathering of all the students, teachers, and families which we have been living with while staying in our rural villages. The morning of the party my Mama told me that she disliked the 5 weeks of scruff which I have not tamed since arriving in Africa, so I shaved off my beard which was on the brink of looking either really gross or very awesome. Through the process I took pictures of my face in various stages including but not limited to scruff, goatee, and mustache, but cut it clean before the home stay party with all of the members of our families from our rural villages. The party consisted of a bunch of speeches by townspeople, teachers, and one by the students followed by hilarious skits by the students, which were totally in Swahili. Swahili although relatively difficult has been picked up proficiently from the three weeks of classes and interacting with only Swahili speakers on my way to school and at home every night. This past week has been a busy one with many papers, charts, and maps to make compiling everything we observed while in our home stays. The first paper which is a 10 pg analysis is based on any resource which you think is important in the Tanzanian village, and dissects everything using personal experiences and first hand resources to reinforce your points. My resource was Time, but many people wrote papers about education, cows, milk, hands, the roads and water. My resource was time and I found that I had more than enough to write about in respect to it. The next assignment was a 5pg paper about gender, and simply to use the readings, experiences, and thoughts, which we have had to construct a paper discussing the different gender roles within TZ. Lastly we had various maps including a resource flow displaying what resources come into and go out of the house where we live, including money, food, electricity, water, etc. Working every day was an interesting transition because we have been doing more field based work and discussions compared to the production of hard copies of papers and charts. Ok this is probably a bit boring so I guess I will lay out the rest of the semester because surprisingly enough it is in sight having around 68 days left in the program. So Monday we leave for Mazumbai Forest reserve where we will have a one week safari with the group of 23 students. Following that week we will be breaking up and traveling to our person specific locations for a week, where we will be studying for our ISP(Independent Study Project) later in the semester. For this week we are supposed to figure out our living situations for the 23 days allocated for this study, hire guides for all of our travel, set up focal groups if needed, etc. Personally I will be studying a troop of Black and White Colobus monkeys Near Mazumbai so I will be able to stay at the housing there with 7 other students studying subjects including fungi, pollination, orchids, strangler figs, community/forest relations, Maasai healer techniques, chameleons, and another person to study the other troop of Colobus monkeys within the forest. These two weeks in Mazumbai for me are a great preparation period for my project wherein I will be able to identify my troop in the forest, lay out all of my methods for the study and create a map for the area which the monkeys reside. Since I am doing a follow-up study almost all of my methods are set, excluding whichever factors I decide to add on to make it my own. This study will be interesting because with the initial study of these fragmented monkeys, we will be able to now draw lines from A-B making conclusions about how these monkeys are adapting over time within their surroundings. Ok so back to the schedule… after my two weeks at Mazumbai everyone will be finding their own transportation back to Arusha where the SIT center is based. Upon arrival we will have to organize our own accommodations in Arusha for a few nights before we embark on our longest two week Safari traveling form Ngorogoro Crater, to the Serengetti, to Lake Natron, where we will have a 4 day, 3 night home stay at a Maasai Boma. If you know nothing about the Maasai culture look them up because they are some amazing people. Within their culture there is no concept of money other then Cattle. A mans wealth is based on how many cows he owns. There is also Polygamy within this culture so the men with more cows usually have more wives and larger bomas. A boma may consist of one man and 4-5 wives living in mud huts with almost no light other than two 3 inch holes in the wall for ventilation for the smoke which is coming from the fire inside the dark hut. The men go through tedious warrior ceremonies including a public circumcision when they are around 15 years old. The men’s days starting when they are around 4 or 5 consist of walking the cows out to a pasture away from the boma to graze for the extent of sunlight in the sky, while the women collect all of the firewood, build their own houses, and make the food. If you Google them you will see their extensive jewelry and awesome body modification techniques which are very intriguing and a type of beautification which many if not all maasai undergo. After the maasai boma we return to Arusha and then are off to our ISP locations for about 20 days in which we collect data and write our 25 page paper analyzing all of the data which we collect. Then we return to Arusha for a week and present all of our project to each other in the mornings having afternoons off to shop, visit our families in Midawe/Bangata, and any other activities which we want to complete before we travel home on May 12th.
No comments:
Post a Comment