Perspective From the Middle of Nowhere

It's 8 a.m. Thursday 26^th April. I leave the house wrapped up warm in my hoodie. There's a chill in the air and rain is beginning to fall. There is a mixture of feelings coursing through my body. Part of me is really excited to see the possibilities open to us after this meeting; part of me just wants us to abandon the whole idea that we are ever going to change the way the Maasai live. I meet with two fellow volunteers, enjoying a warming coffee at the place we were supposed to meet. Our ride has not shown up though, so we are left waiting, discussing our hopes for the day ahead. Our ride picks us up; we head straight to Sokonone in order to pick up the food.

The road is bumpy and the previous nights activities does not sit well with one of the other volunteers. Having picked up our food and deposited some other food behind a bush, we head from Sokonone west towards Nanja. The car ride is cramped, slow and we are stopped twice by the cops but nothing happens. We pull up outside a small unassuming village, we greet our co-ordinator who is going to lead us through the bush to the village itself. The road gets even more uneven. We are running behind schedule. Multiple times we stop, the driver disembarking to inspect the route we are taking. Multiple times he comes back shaking his head but still we proceed. As we make our way up a muddy hill we spot four Maasai men digging their vehicle out of the mud. Could be us soon. We climb higher and higher as we reach rolling hillsides, surrounded by farmland, a sea of green after the rains.

Suddenly, we have stopped and are told to get out of the vehicle. The road is too muddy here and we must proceed by foot with our co-ordinator ferrying our supplies by motorbike. Conscious of the time, I ask how far the village is. It is not far, I am told, we can see it over in the direction that our supervisor is pointing. It does not seem so far, which is reassuring. We begin to walk in that direction, along the soft mud path, taking care of where we step. I have worn walking boots which suit this task but one of the other volunteers is in flip-flops. We pass some Maasai children on the way who stare at us, confused and curious. We continue walking. As we pass the huts we had thought our supervisor meant, he motions to our actual destination, on top of a hill in the distance. Laughter floats across the hills as we joke about our predicament in order to prevent ourselves from succumbing to despair.

Eventually, we reach the bottom of the hill and begin our ascent. We are met at the top by four Maasai who welcome us to their village. We trudge a little further before being ushered into a school building. As we sit, grateful for the rest, twenty or thirty Maasai elders being filing in, sitting as children would at their desks, curious to see the travellers in their peaceful land. They stare and they talk. The food is distributed among those gathered, a welcome relief to myself and the other hungry volunteers. While we eat, the introductions are made, interrupted, and then made again. We do not take much notice. After a while, we finally proceed with our mission: to discover their attitudes towards FGM. They are open about their support for it and seem to us to have a distinct lack of education towards the dangers. It was a troubling meeting. We ask about the government ban on FGM and they laugh it off, the government can not reach them out here. It's like they are telling us we are banging our heads against a brick wall. There seems to be a colossal barrier forming between us and them. They are aggressively defending their way of life, though, and we expect this to happen. This is what we need to change. They tell us the government ban is purely to halt the spread of HIV, that the ritual is important in marking the passage from child to adult. Being circumcised is what earns one respect. They seems to have a vague idea of the health implications, or at least a vague idea is what the portray to us. We are told how they restrict the food a pregnant woman can have so the baby is underdeveloped, allowing for a less painful passage into the world. They describe the force they will use if the girls refuse and when one of the young men is asked if he would marry one of the female volunteers, he replies “only if she is circumcised”. They also tell us that removing a woman's clitoris helps control prostitution.

Then it is their turn to ask us about our culture. They ask how we tell our children from our adults. It is hard for us to explain that you are an adult when you start acting like one, so we give eighteen as the arbitrary age of an adult. The closest thing we think they can relate to is the Jewish Bar Mitzvah.

We leave, culturally rich from the experience but also with a real sense of how hard a human rights project on FGM will be. This does not bother us. We knew it would be difficult. It gives perspective, meeting with these Maasai with their traditions under a bright blue sky, miles from the closest town. As we walk back, we realise how privileged we are to be who we are, to have grown up where we did, but also how much we should respect these Maasai and the beauty that surrounds them.

NOTE: Sorry if the style of this post bugs people. Was just attempting something a bit new.