Friday, March 10, 2006
Postcards from the African plains
Libba Wolfe
Libba Wolfe's column appears twice monthly in Extra.
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I'm back on Eastern Standard Time. I've finished the malaria pills and stored the suitcases in the attic. My husband is working on the massive download of the 5,000 (no kidding) pictures he took during our two weeks in Tanzania.
It's going to take much longer to figure out how to describe what we saw and felt and learned traveling in a third-world East African country. There's certainly no reason for me to take a camera, but I have some quick mental snapshots.
We felt right at home the very first morning. Tanzania is a country of wavers. Crowds of children, old men resting under trees, goat herders and cow tenders in the fields -- everybody waves. And I don't mean those two-fingered, head nodding rural USA greetings. I mean full armed windmill waves.
I know some of you are familiar with the Heifer Project International. Maybe you're one of the Roanokers who have donated cows to African families on the condition that the offspring be given to another family in need. Maybe you wondered how much difference one cow could make.
We stopped at a little cheese shop. The "mama" who owned it got a cow from the Heifer Project four years ago. She learned to make cheese and opened a little business. She employs and teaches several women. Her children go to school. She's given away a calf and bought some goats.
Wonder no more; one cow can change many lives.
Driving through the dusty foothills of Mt. Kilimanjaro, we saw the Maasai tribes. Nothing I had seen on TV or in National Geographic prepared me for the mysterious beauty of these nomadic people. They may know very little about the modern world, but they understand the secrets of the natural world of the African plains.
Our guides translated when a Maasai warrior took us on a woodland walk. Every shrub and tree had a use -- leaves for healing teas and poultices, branches carved into toothbrushes, berries to purify water, even an African Viagra.
Let your mind take you past the huge migration herds of wildebeests, zebras and elephants to ... all that dung.
The Maasai use the zebra dung for fuel, cow dung for hut construction and treat asthma with elephant dung tea. (My husband has gotten used to my overweight luggage full of the rocks I collect, but he gave me "the look" when I started talking about souvenir elephant dung for my compost pile.)
A Maasai warrior -- tall, sinewy, coal-black skin, purple and red robes with an orange sheathed machete -- is as elegant and at home in the wild as a lion.
Tourism in Tanzania is big business. Our native Tanzanian guides -- Moses, Julius and Nixon -- gave us campfire lectures on African politics, history and culture. They speak their tribal languages plus Swahili, French and English. They are also fluent in "wild life." They could identify, imitate and translate bird calls, mating calls, territorial roars, hunger grunts and full-belly snores. They could spot straw-colored cheetah ears above straw-colored grass from a moving Land Cruiser a quarter mile away.
They were trained to calm Americans when lions came near the tents at night, when we woke to the sounds of chomping zebras or when we started worrying too much about pythons. They have to keep a close eye on their clients.
On our visit to a Maasai village I was surrounded by a happy crowd of little boys. We were shaking hands and they were practicing "hello," and I was practicing the Swahili greeting "jambo." The boys wanted to shake over and over, and they were pulling their robes over their heads to hide their laughter. I was attracting quite a crowd and feeling like a major hit -- until a guide pulled me aside and delicately explained that "jambo" is not the same as "jamba." I had been shaking hands and saying, "Break wind, break wind."
My snapshot memory of those giggling boys proves that eight-year-old humor transcends all cultures.
Libba Wolfe's column appears twice a month in Extra.
