Dr. Simon Ngoka, who helps organize home-based care for the sick, helped explain why the Masai in particular are so vulnerable. There is a new highway nearby that runs for hundreds of kilometres south. It was built with Japanese money, to help tourists reach the famous Ngorongoro Crater, the Olduvai Gorge, and the Serengeti. Forced off their cattle-grazing lands by nearly ten years of drought and reluctant to learn other forms of agriculture, many Masai men worked on the road. They picked up hiv from sex trade workers along the highway and took the disease home to what had been, up to that point, closed sexual communities (i.e., Masai almost always had sex only with other Masai). Ngoka said he believes the Masai need a targeted hiv/aids education program if they are to survive. “It will be very difficult to avoid hiv if you are Masai,” he said. “The big phenomenon is coming.”
But how do you reach these intensely private, ritualistic people? By way of reply, Luoga took me on another drive through Masai lands, this time to Selele. The sprawling village is about an hour’s journey by rutted road from Mto wa Mbu, past giraffes blinking lazily by the side of the road and herds of skeletal cattle, and through a landscape so water starved and overgrazed that even weeds fail to sprout. Traditionally, boma are barely tall enough to stand up in and have neither windows nor chimneys. Nonetheless, women cook on wood fires inside the huts, and many develop lung cancer or go blind because of the soot and smoke. (The men leave the boma at first light to be with other men and do not return until dark.) Unable to change Masai behaviour around their sexual practices directly, Luoga came up with an alternative plan involving boma.
He raised a few thousand dollars to renovate approximately 150 Masai huts by installing chimneys and windows in them. At first, there was tremendous resistance by both women and men, but there were converts. Happiness Lemuriet was one. Tall and stately in her white headdress and two sets of earrings, she welcomed me into her mud dwelling. It was immaculate and featured a mattress — something Luoga had never seen before in a Masai hut — a clear indication that she was her husband’s favourite wife. Her renovated hut had three windows, a hearth, and a chimney. Before, she told me, her ceiling was covered in soot, and people inside could not see one another. She no longer has a cough, and because the new chimney was so efficient she was using 70 percent less firewood, which meant less time searching the countryside for the scarce resource. Her children could read and write inside, as there was natural light. Lemuriet is a trailblazer who encouraged others in this village of 2,400 to join the program. Many remained suspicious, but at the time of our visit there were twenty-five huts with chimneys. Today, there are 150.
As we left Selele, Luoga explained that if he could show the Masai they could trust him on chimneys, then they might trust him about hiv/aids. But this is proving difficult, and, on a very sombre note, Luoga said he is bearing witness to a disaster in the making.
After Mto wa Mbu, I travelled to Zanzibar, Tanzania’s island playground, where I stayed for $168 a night in a five-star hotel overlooking a white, sandy beach and the Indian Ocean. The sheets were thick and crisp, and the room had fresh-cut flowers and a basket of tropical fruit. I bathed with scented bubbles to wash away the dust of Mto wa Mbu, put on my white linen, and sat on the balcony watching a parade of dhows on the blue ocean. Then I went downstairs to the bar for a glass of chilled white wine from the Western Cape.
Later, as my husband and I wandered through ancient Stone Town’s beachside park — where the night blackness is lit by scores of barbecued fish stalls — we spotted two Masai men. They were sprawled out on the ground in their red shawls, holding the sticks that ought to have been used for herding cattle and fending off lions on the savannah. They were laughing and limb sloppy, maybe drunk. At their feet were knick-knacks and jewellery, made, no doubt, by Masai women back home on a boma. They gestured to us, urging us to buy, to take home an artifact representing these proud tribespeople.
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Read online correspondent Arno Kopecky’s Notes from Nairobi blog, visit The Walrus Blogs.
