Home-stay with Mama Rita

The last few days have been absolutely insane here in Tanzania! After our non-program day we went to Ngorongoro Crater for a field lecture and an all day game drive. Then we had our second homestay with an Iraqw tribe family. Next was our last full day of classes where we spent all day traveling around Manyara, Mto wa Mbu, and Burunge. Yesterday was a study day and today we had our finals and final project for Wildlife Ecology was due. So I have had very little time for anything except being here in Tanzania and trying to enjoy all the cool things we do without being too stressed.

This post is going to be about my home stay. My partner this time for the home stay was Allison! I was very excited to get to spend the day with her. Neither us are particularly skilled at Swahili but she is crazy and a lot of fun.

Allison and I

When we first arrived at our "home" for the day, we got to meet our mama, baba, wadada, and wakaka (mom, dad, sisters, and brothers). They seemed like such a happy family. They smiled at us, laughed at our horrible attempts to communicate, and put us right to work. We were taken inside the boma and they started a fire. We were asked to help blow air on it, to get it to light. I guess we were doing something wrong because the whole family was laughing at our attempts. We did not really have much impact on the fire and as soon as Rita took over, the fire lit right away.

This is not hookah, but me trying to start a fire

We started to heat milk, tea leaves, and sugar in a pot for chai. Then we got to meet our best friend for that day, Reynaldo. He is a 10 year old student. When I asked him why he wasn't at school, he said "I want to watch the wazungu (white people)." So I felt a little bad that our presence was causing him to miss school, but he was a great person to spend the whole day with. He actually reminded me a lot of my cousin Patrick.

Cutting cabbage with my rafiki, Reynaldo 

I really love this kid

So they kept us busy all morning with cleaning, weeding, laundry, cooking lunch, sweeping the ground outside(still do not know why we did that), raking up corn stalks around the livestock pen and burning them, and playing with the kids.  

Doing laundry

After we eat our ugali, cooked cabbage, mystery meat, and rice that we cooked for lunch, they put us in the shade and told us to rest. I think SFS must have told them not to break us or something. Allison and I were full of energy and ready to keep working, but they wanted us to rest. So we played with the kids for about two hours. They taught us some songs and we taught them ring around the rosie. But the littlest kid in the family was a little too small for that game and would fall over as soon as we started moving.

The kids grabbed my hands and started skipping away until
Mama Rita yelled at them to "bring the white girl back" :)

They were very interested in our cameras so we handed them over to the kids and taught them how to use them. We didn't get them back for a very long time. After they got tired of taking pictures of us and their family, they decided to run off to take pictures of their neighbors. Looking through those pictures was hysterical! There were a lot of crooked and unfocused pictures of course. But there was also quite a few of people who looked less than enthusiastic about being photographed. There was one picture of a man asleep in his bed. There was another one of a woman in a towel who looked like she was yelling at him to leave.

Sorting the dirt clumps out of the beans 

After they thought the wazungu had enough rest, they pulled out the beans that our friends Rachel and Kris had collected. We sat down on a woven mat and they showed us how to take out the dirt clumps and bad beans. We did this for about an hour and Mama Rita had sorted twice the amount that Allison and I had sorted together.

Herding the cattle and shoats (sheep + goats)

Then we were told to help the boys graze the livestock. They had about 10 cattle and 15 shoats. We used weeds to herd them to the "pasture" and then kept them from running away. There was one sheep that had a very young lamb with her. The lamb was not keeping up with the group very well. It kept lying down in the shade and was not grazing with the rest of the group. I went over to it and pulled at its skin. The skin took at least 3 seconds to stretch back out like normal. Also, the lambs mucous membranes were pale and took a long time to regain color after touching them. These are all the classic signs of dehydration. So we decided it would be worth telling Reynaldo that the lamb needed some water. It apparently did not translate very well because he came back with a bucket of soapy water that we had used for laundry. He then tossed the lamb in and started scrubbing at it. So Allison and I ended up giving a bath to a lamb...

Washing a lamb due to misunderstanding