The Mara, Revisited

My parents and I headed to the Maasai Mara so they could experience a Kenyan safari. It was awesome—we saw the Big Five (elephants, leopards, rhinos, buffalo, and lions) along with all sorts of other cool animals and wildlife. I can tell I’ve been in Africa a while though; you know you’re getting jaded when you don’t even turn around in your seat to see a herd of zebras anymore.

The most interesting part of the Mara to me was visiting a traditional Maasai village. To put it delicately it was a tourist trap, but to go deeper it felt so disheartening. They tell the tourists what they want to hear (“We don’t get many visitors” “The money you give us goes to the school” “My grandfather made this bracelet [with a ‘MADE IN CHINA’ inscription on the inside]”). With so much revenue coming in from tourism, you’d think they would live in decent conditions, but unfortunately that’s not the case. The manyattas they stay in are cramped (understatement of the year), filled with smoke from their cooking fires, and dark. When you go outside to catch a breath of fresh air you’re thrown by the smell of cow dung, which litters the whole village due to their cattle sleeping in the center of all the houses every night. The dung also attracts flies, which cover the faces of all of the children. Female circumcision is a traditional rite that is still practiced despite its danger (women who are circumcised have much more difficult childbirths) and questionable regard of basic human rights. Some of the children go to school, some stay home and herd the animals. Almost no one goes to high school. Traveling to Nairobi is practically unheard of. There are no trash cans—garbage is simply thrown on the ground.

We visited the Maasai primary school, and the children were such lights. They were shy at first, but when my mom, a retired teacher, chatted with the first graders a little bit she was able to get them to open up. They showed off their workbooks and sang the ABC’s for us. It kills me that these kids won’t get to go to high school. That they return home every night to cramped houses and parents who are so bent on preserving their culture that they’ve morphed into caricatures. That they don’t have a choice.