Reflection

I've been back in the States for about two weeks now, and I'm starting to process and decompress the four months I spent in Tanzania. I'm figuring out everything I learned in the classroom and in the field, what I learned about the culture and about myself. I'm discovering why I loved Tanzania only now, after returning home. I don't think I realized how much I loved that place until I left it.

Of course I'm enjoying the more tangible things, like dependable electricity, running water, and fast internet. I'm really loving the change to cold weather, it's so nice to curl up under covers to go to sleep rather than sprawling out under the mosquito net with the fan on high. I'm not really sure what to say about what I've taken from my semester abroad. What I do know is that it was a fantastic experience that I wouldn't ever take back, and that I feel like a more confident, independent, and interesting person because of it. The semester wasn't easy, I'll admit that, but I think because of the things I was forced to struggle with (both Tanzanian and from home), I've become a lot stronger as well.

I love Tanzania. I love the country, the people, the culture, everything about it. There's something about that place that can't be captured in words or pictures, and just has to be experienced. I truly hope that someday I can go back to that country that I love so deeply, that has truly touched my heart and soul, and that will live with me for the rest of my life whether or not I return. Tanzania has become part of who I am, and I am so proud of that.

So for now I leave this blog.
Nitaonana baadae, Tanzania. Nakupenda.

Dirt & Bones

After we completed our field research outside of Tarangire National Park, we had one more week of traveling on a field trip for our Human Evolution class before we returned to Dar. We packed up our campsite and left on the morning of November 15th, and drove all day through Ngorongoro Conservation Area until we reached the small village of Endulen located in the Conservation Area. We camped outside the area hospital, where in previous years most of the anthropology students on this program had stayed to do medical anthropology projects and projects with the Maasai, seeing as there are many bomas in the area. This year, due to budget cuts and the high number of students who contracted malaria at this site, we all stayed at the Tarangire site. It turned out well, though, as all of our projects were successful and even to this date nobody has gotten anything serious, only minor stomach bugs that usually came from food poisoning. Anyway, we stayed at Endulen for two nights, and visited two major archaeological sites.

First was Olduvai Gorge, which any Anthropologist knows is an incredibly important site for Human Evolution. I was exceptionally excited to visit Olduvai. Since high school Biology, I’ve always taken a particular interest in Human Evolution, and so I’d naturally read a lot about Olduvai in text books then and for my Human Evolution both last Fall at Grinnell and here in Tanzania. It was really awesome to finally get to visit this place that I’d read so much about and seen in pictures for so many years. The gorge itself is gorgeous, as well, so just seeing the natural beauty was spectacular as well. After a brief lecture on basic information about the area, we drove to Mary Leakey’s camp on the ridge of the gorge where Louis Leakey, Mary Leakey, and their son Robert ran their research. Then we drove down into the gorge to the Zinjanthropus site. Olduvai is particularly famous for Mary Leakey’s first big find in 1959, Australopithecus bosiei, or as she named it ‘Zinjanthropus’ which means East African man. They found a skull as well as post-cranial (non-skull) remains at this site, and a year later also found remains of another species, Homo habilis, very nearby in direct association with ancient stone tools from the Olduwan tool industry. After visiting the site, taking pictures with the plaque, and looking around at the huge excavation that took place exactly 50 years ago (the 50th anniversary of the discovery was this past August), we walked up the gorge further to the two other major sites where more Homo habilis remains and stone tools were found. At one point, our professor had us ‘practice archaeology’ and we were asked to walk around the excavation site and look for stone tools and any skeletal remains. I found a ton of faunal bones and a few crude stone tools, but my exciting find was a jaw fragment and two teeth from an ancient extinct giant pig!

After visiting the excavation sites, we drove to the other side of the gorge to visit the ‘shifting sands’. This place was really perplexing. It’s just a large sand dune made of black sand in the middle of the plains. Apparently it moves about 5 centimeters every day! It was really bizarre. We took our shoes off and played on the dune for a while before piling back into the safari vehicles to make the very bumpy drive back up to our camp at Endulen.

The next day we visited Laetoli, where Mary Leakey discovered a 30-foot track way of footprints made by Australopithecus afarensis (more famously known as ‘Lucy’) in cemented volcanic ash about 3.75 million years ago. It’s an important site because it’s the earliest undisputable evidence for habitual bipedalism in our ancestors. Unfortunately, due to lack of infrastructure in Tanzania, the track way has been preserved and covered in order to conserve it. So all we really got to see were pictures in the little museum and a long strip of a mound of lava cobbles covering the place were the footprints are. Plans are in place to build a museum over the footprints so people can come and view them, but electricity isn’t dependable enough and opening the track way would require a climate controlled museum. Additionally, the site is in an extremely remote location, and there isn’t a huge tourist draw, which makes constructing a museum not really practical. It was still pretty neat to visit the site, and try to picture what it looks like under all those protective layers.

In the afternoon after visiting Laetoli, we packed up our camp at Endulen and traveled to our next site near Lake Eyasi. This journey was epic, to say the least. Not 10 minutes into our drive, it started to rain a heavy African rain that comes down in sheets and floods everything. And of course, driving on dirt roads down the extremely steep escarpment wall of the rift valley plus this rain doesn’t make for easy traveling. The going was slow, but things were okay. The rain let up after a while, but the roads were littered with deep puddles and occasionally we’d come across a river of a flash flood racing across the road. Once we were really driving down the escarpment, the road was probably at a 45 degree angle going down and really sharp hairpin turns. At one point, the vehicle in front of us had its brakes go out, and it almost toppled over on the road and could have gone tumbling down the wall. Luckily, everything worked out fine, but it was terrifying to see the car in front of us with 5 of my friends in it almost tip over. I was actually really shocked that the car didn’t end up tipping, but thank goodness it did! After this point, things just got silly. The people in that car were forced to get out and start walking while the driver worked on some repairs, because functional brakes are just not an option on an extremely dangerous road like this. Eventually the car was fixed, and caught up, and all the vehicles were together again. Not long after reaching the lake basin, the supply truck behind us got stuck in a river bed. This led to a good hour of trying to get the car out. They tried towing it out forwards with a cable, towing it out backwards, pushing it forwards, pushing it backwards, gathering stones and placing them under the tires in the mud, shoveling out water and mud. It was ridiculous. I got so incredibly muddy from helping push. Finally the car was freed, and we were on our way again. After another few hours of driving, we finally reached our destination at Eyasi around 9pm and set up camp in the dark and ate dinner late.

The next day we drove out to Mumba rock shelter, which is a site from the Middle Stone Age under a large rock outcropping. Excavations were done here that yielded archaic Homo sapiens remains as well as tools and faunal remains. It’s also a particularly interesting site because of the paintings on the walls of the rock. We climbed to the top of the rocks and had a lecture in the wind at the top of all the rocks. The view from up there was so beautiful! After our lecture, we drove out to a site near the lake shore that has all sorts of artifacts. Pottery sherds, beads, faunal remains. We walked around the site and picked up artifacts. I found a handful of beautiful pottery that had designs etched in them, and my Professor let me take two with me (he did his Ph.D. on this site and others in the area).

On Thursday we had the opportunity to visit a local tribe known as the Hadzabe, who are one of the last if not the last remaining functioning hunter-gatherer groups in the world. We had the option of hunting with the men, and of course I decided to join! We spent probably two hours running through bushes and trees, and I ended up pretty scraped up and bruised afterwards. It was a really fun time, though, even though we didn’t catch anything (probably because of how many of us there were joining them). When we returned to their camp, they sang and danced for us, which was great. Their music was so different from the Maasai music that I had been studying for four weeks, so it was very cool to hear other indigenous music from Tanzania. It made me want to come back and study more African music! Good thing I’m taking the ‘African Music’ class at Grinnell next semester! In the afternoon, we visited another local tribe called the Datoga. They’re similar to the Maasai in their practices with cattle and trade of beads. The women wear gorgeous cow-hide dresses with ornate beading designs. We also visited a Datoga blacksmith and saw how they manufacture things. They make really neat bracelets and arrowheads, which they sell and trade with other tribes.

Friday was our free day, so we all decided to go back out to the rock outcroppings near the lake shore to go hiking and rock climbing. We all climbed to the top of the tallest hill, which was an adventure. Naturally there was no trail, so we were scrambling up boulders and crawling under thorny bushes. I was scratched up even more when we reached the top, but the view was incredible. You could see for miles, over the lake and the escarpment wall stretching as far as the eye can see. Then we climbed down and did some bouldering on the big boulders at the base of the hill. Some people decided to explore up another big boulder, and went climbing up. Apparently a hyena was on their tails, though, so that was a little scary! It was a really relaxing and fun last day on our field trip. In the evening, a dancing and singing group came in from another town and performed for us. It was a really fun performance, and at the end we all got up and danced for a while.

On Saturday we drove all the way back to Arusha, and were thrust back into the ‘big city’ life, if you can call it that. But after spending 6, almost 7, weeks living basically in the middle of nowhere, Arusha can definitely be considered a big city. We went out to lunch at the Maasai café and got delicious pizza and enjoyed some cold drinks and just hung out for a while, before returning to our hotel in the afternoon to enjoy having internet again. Very early on Sunday morning, we all piled onto a bus and made the 8-hour journey back to Dar. We were all returned to our homestays, which was so nice. Our host Mama was so excited to see us again, and it was a really nice homecoming.

Seeing as it’s now my last week in Tanzania, I’m incredibly busy. I’ve got to finish my final research paper on my research for Friday, as well as put together a poster and presentation which will happen on Wednesday. On top of that, I need to buy final souvenirs and gifts for people, as well as do all the things I want to do one last time before I leave (like eat at Addis in Dar one more time - the fantastic Ethiopian restaurant downtown). Hopefully I’ll get everything done, and the week won’t be too stressful so I can enjoy my last days here. So far things have been going pretty well. The Ecology and Evolution finals were the first week we were back, and went well. I was relatively stressed about everything because we hadn’t really had class since September, so I had to remember all of that material. Other than that I’ve just been enjoying being back in the city and on campus again and working on my paper. I’ve made good progress, but I’ve still got quite a bit to do. This past weekend we spent two days on the beach, which was great. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to return to the beach on Thursday or Friday one more time. Yesterday, also, I got my hair done, and now I have long braids. All the Tanzanians keep saying ‘umependeza’ to me, which basically means ‘you look nice’, so that’s been pretty cool. It’s a pretty drastic change from my previous light brown, curly, bob. I love it though, and hopefully it’ll last long enough for all of you to see!

Field Research!

From October 18th to November 15th, we stayed at Zion campsite 5 kilometers outside of Tarangire National Park near the village of Kibaoni. It really was a village, too. No internet café, no supermarket. Our campsite had no electricity, so we either had to charge things off our solar-charged car batteries, or walk into town and use the electricity at the mini ‘supermarket’ (if you could call it that). Walking into town usually meant purchasing something as well, the supermarket had incredibly cold sodas which would be really refreshing when the afternoons would reach into the mid-90s.

During our first full day at Tarangire, we drove into the park to meet with the park Ecologist. This was for the four students doing Ecology research projects in and around the park. It wasn’t totally useless for us Anthropology students, though, because he presented some interesting basic facts about the National Park for us. Later in the afternoon, all the non-Ecology students got to return to the park to do some safari. We saw much of the same things we had already seen in Lake Manyara and Serengeti, but it was still a lot of fun. Tarangire is famous for elephants and baobab trees, and for good reason! There are huge baobabs everywhere you look, and elephants roaming the plains everywhere as well. It was really exciting, seeing as elephants are my favorite animal! We also saw a rather large herd of wildebeest on our way out of the park, which was awesome. We didn’t get to see any wildebeest in the Serengeti because the herds were all up in the Maasai Steppe in Kenya at that time of the year.

For the next 3 ½ weeks, we all conducted our research for our projects. My project was about the traditional songs of Maasai women, and how they shape and maintain gender roles. If you didn’t already know, Maasai women are highly marginalized. Men are the dominant gender in all aspects, and domestic violence against both women and children is the common practice. So I wanted to see how the traditional songs that the women sing preserve the patriarchal structure. I conducted a total of 30 interviews at bomas and in the village with just Maasai women. I haven’t finished writing my paper, but I’m pretty sure at this point that my research supports my hypothesis, that the songs do indeed perpetuate the marginalizing place of women in Maasai culture. As one key example, the women often use singing to apologize to their husbands if they’ve done wrong or beg for forgiveness, and sometimes women sing to praise their husbands. I also found, however, that the songs do not necessarily only restrict the women. All of the women I interviewed talked about how happy singing makes them, and that’s why they sing so often. For Maasai women, I believe singing is a release. It brings them joy when their lives are often extremely difficult due to their place in society under men. I think my research turned out well, and now I’ve got a little over a week to complete my 20-30 page report on my research, and then give a short presentation with a poster at the National Museum in downtown Dar.

During the field research time I also helped other people with their projects. I helped Fergs (Amy, my roommate from the dorms) and Christine a lot, because their projects corresponded with mine, they were both interviewing Maasai women exclusively. Fergs was looking at how the manufacture and selling of crafts (beads and jewelry) for locals and tourists gives women a sense of independence. Christine researched how selling milk is a form of independence for the women, as well. Their projects were both really interesting, and it was always fun to sit in on their interviews. The person I helped the most, though, was David. David was the only person to do an archaeological project, and I was excited to help him because I took Archaeological Field Methods last Spring and wanted to put my knowledge into practice. In the area in and around our campsite, the ground is literally littered with stone tools from the Middle Stone Age industry (about 400,000 years ago). You basically can’t walk anywhere without stepping on one. David picked two sites, one right next to the campsite on a slight terrace, and one down the hill on flat ground. At the terrace site, he just established transects, which are just measured divisions of the plot. I would go out with him and help him take measurements, but primarily collect artifacts. At the second site, we established the plot and transects, and then collected artifacts. After that was completed, David started doing a test pit at the site to see if there were artifacts below the surface. I got to help him with that one day, which was really fun. Nothing like digging in the dirt under the hot African sun!

I also went into the park one day with two of the Ecology people, Tabriz (Aimee, my homestay roommate) and Julia. Tabriz did her project on baobab trees, and Julia did hers on guinea fowl and francolin birds. We were working on the trees first, and had taken measurements and data on one tree, and were working on the second when it started raining. When it rains in this country, it doesn’t just drizzle. The mantra ‘when it rains, it pours’ is completely true. So not soon after the rain started slowly, we were in a torrential downpour, with the wind ripping in making the rain fall sideways. We finished taking data quickly on that tree, and rushed back to the car completely soaking wet. The roads had already started flooding, and we had to figure out how we were going to get back to the gate without getting stuck. The way we had come in had taken us through the dried river bed, which would clearly not be possible anymore, so we had to take the long way back which was tricky. The rain was falling so fast and so much that the roads were like rivers and the plains had turned into lakes and swamps. We were all already so wet, that we decided we wanted to enjoy the downpour fully rather than sitting inside the car like wet dogs and the windows fogged up from our breathing. So we opened the windows and stuck our heads out as we drove through the flooded plains, and the rain showering us with more water. It was a really invigorating experience that I can’t really explain well. At one point we got stuck on a road that was flooded with water that was probably 2 feet deep, and we were really worried that we wouldn’t get out, but our skilled driver Babu (which means grandfather in Swahili) successfully freed us. After the rains stopped, we visited a baobab tree that had a huge hole in it in which you could stand, so we took some pictures before climbing back into the wet car and heading back to camp. This was definitely my favorite and most memorable day in the field!

Daily life in the field was pretty bland. There were 14 of us, and 8 doing Anthropology projects that necessitated one of our 3 translators, so there was lots of time sitting in camp with nothing to do. I read 11 books and listened to a lot of music. We tossed the frisbee around a lot, and invented silly games like ‘rock-tire’ which involved two tires placed about 15 feet apart and trying to throw rocks into the opposing team’s tire. Although we got bored and a little stir-crazy by the end, it was a fantastic time and we all got to know each other so well. By the end of our last field trip when we were returning to Dar, we were all very sad to be parting ways and not living with each other all the time anymore. I had a great field research experience!

Coming up next, the week of field trips to important archaeological sites in Northern Tanzania!