The post I wrote when I should have been in bed...

Hello again! I can't believe it's October already! I bet it's getting cold where all of you are and the leaves are turning beautiful colors and everyone's super pumped about the Phillies, but here it's as sunny, dry, dusty, and lacking in baseball as ever. And I have a terrible cold. Anyway, here's a quick update on the past few days:

So on Sunday we went to the big Maasai age-set ceremony, which was pretty cool. There were just a lot of people just kind of hanging out. They built a whole new boma just for the ceremony, and people were in there making tea and food for everyone. They slaughtered a bull to give to all the warriors. We were not there for that, but I did accidentally see a little more of the preperations that I would have liked to... But a lot of the people spoke pretty good English, so we just walked around meeting people. We were the only wazungu there, so people were pretty curious about us.

On Monday we had homestays all day! I spent the day with a friend at a Maasai mama's boma helping her with all her chores. We replastered the house with cow poop, (which was actually really fun and not gross at all!) made tea, cooked lunch, (ugali with cabbages- delicious!) did dishes, fetched water, (which nearly killed me...) took a short nap, played with the children, and collected firewood. We obviously didn't say much to each other, but we were able to pantimime most things, and the women laughed at us when we tried to talk, and so we laughed too. The whole day was really exhausting, but REALLY fun.

On Tuesday we went back to Amboseli to visit a cultural Manyata, which is basically a "traditional" Maasai village set up for tourists to come visit. And on the way there, we saw...LIONS!!! Four of them! We stopped for quite a while to look at them- it was so cool!

So the cultural Manyata was interesting, but after all our experiences with the Maasai we could tell that a lot of it was staged, so it was hard to enjoy as much as the tourists. For example, they lined up all the children and made them sing and do math for us, which was adorable, but also a little frightening... We've been doing a lot of reading and discussing about how what tourists want to think Maasai culture is like is more like what Maasai culture was like a hundred years ago, and a lot of people are capitalizing on letting them think that. Interesting stuff, but I won't get into that here- you can read my paper that I'm about to write when I get home if you're actually interested...

After that, we spent the afternoon at a super fancy tourist lodge. We had a BIG but expensive lunch buffet and then hung out by the pool. It was fun, but it was really weird- I felt like I was suddenly back in America or Europe. I guess I'm already starting to realize how many things I take for granted at home are actually luxuries- things like dessert, soap dispensers, clean towels, landscaping, not having to worry about monkeys breaking into your car, etc.

Anyway, ever since then I've pretty much just been hanging around camp, going to class, writing papers, and feeling ill. I'll let you all know next time something interesting happens!