Mairowa is a small village a bit less than an hour off the main road from Tanzania to Kenya. Its smack bang in the middle of Maasai land and very much off the beaten track. When you arrive you could be forgiven for thinking you'd stepped into the pages of a National Geographic magazine, complete with round mud huts (bomas), young Maasai boys looking after massive herds of cattle, and little children looking rather disheveled but incredibly social as they go about their day to day life. Men and women in traditional Maasai dress stop and greet us at every opportunity. The brightly coloured blanket clothing (shukas) draped around their shoulders and contrasts with the stark dusty environment. Of course you see plenty of all of those things all over Tanzania. Mairowa just multiplies it all and takes away the western things that get mixed into the towns and cities.
We drove toward Mairowa and came across a young shepherd boy asking for food. Our driver had half a donut (madanzi) left from breakfast so offered it to this boy. The boy refused however and indicated that the driver should throw the mandazi on the ground so he could get it. He was so terrified of coming close to the car that even his hunger wasn't enough to get him to come even one step closer. In the end our driver wrapped the mandazi in a paper towel and threw it out to the boy. The boy snatched it up and gobbled it up lightening quick. Amazing how the things that are everyday to us can be so foreign to people living out here. Four of our student teachers are now in Mairowa for their final 3 month teaching practice and then will return there after exams to teach for 3 years. They are all sponsored through teachers college by the organisation that runs the school, Imara Ministries. When we visited them last week they shared with us some of the challenges of getting to know a new place, especially one as remote as this. One of their biggest challenges is that that the students they are teaching hardly know Kiswahili, let alone English. Most of the children and their parents speak Kimaa (The Maasai language) at home and
to each other. That makes teaching at an English medium school a bit of a challenge! They're rising to the challenge though and we saw some good lessons with creative ways of making themselves understood. Its times like this that I encourage our students to make full use of body language and gestures! We had fun learning a few Kimaa words and doing our best to properly greet those we talked to. Another Mairowa 'challenge' is the lack of phone reception. To be honest, it still blows me away that out here in the middle of nowhere there is even any phone reception, but given the number of people who use cell phones in Tanzania, I guess there has to be. We quite enjoyed our 40 minute walk each afternoon up the hill to search for those little reception bars that connect you to the outside world. Its very hard to get lost on these walks when any person passing by will happily point you back to the only guest house in town, though we did manage to find ourselves stuck in a field of beans, surrounded by think thorn bushes put there as a fence. Some children sitting under a nearby tree had a great laugh watching us jump the thorns to get out. Our best reception spot is right next to a thorn bush just by the 2nd Maasai boma. It makes for very public but picturesque phone calls.
At night, I saw the most stars I have ever seen in my life. It literally took my breath away every night. Every constellation is accentuated when there's no electricity. The darkness always just makes the light seem so much brighter. I'm sure that's a good parable for life right there.
