Maasai village

Even though I'm home now, the stories will continue 😊

I decided to divide the Maasai Mara experience into two parts in order to reduce the amount of pictures and thus the crashing of the software. Without further ado, here is part two of the Maasai Mara. 

One afternoon we decided to visit our spotter Rarin's Maasai village that is located in the Mara.

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On the road to the village Jacop and Rarin explained to us the essentials of Maasai customs and family life. I'll just write down the few things I still remember.

The Maasai economy traditionally has two major activities: herding of cows and goats (mainly men's work) as well as the crafting of bracelets, necklaces, earrings and all kinds of other decorative stuff (mainly women's work).

When Maasai merry, the husband's family pays the wife's family the price of ten cows. So for a financially sustainable family situation it is good if you have a balance of daughters and sons. Then it is of course good business practice to make your daughters work early on and not waste too much time with education as that does really nothing for your profit as the girls' price is fixed at 10 cows. I was wondering at that point if the Maasai really didn't develop a market economy when it came to marriage deals? If you could choose between a highly educated wife that contributes much more to the family income you'd surely be prepared to pay a "higher price" than for a barely educated one? But on the other hand the former then questions certain traditions and gender roles and that only leads to trouble? 🤔

Another thing I remember is that kids lower their heads in order to greet their elders and don't lift them until you touch the heads with your palm. It happened also to us when we entered the village and a few times I was distracted and forgot to relieve them. 🤦‍♂️

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There we were welcomed by Rarin's kids. :)


We could visit the huts they are living in.



Within, each hut is divided into a part for the animals...


...and one for the people.


They always keep a fire burning for the whole night. For that the Maasai use a wood that burns very cleanly, thus causing very little CO emissions. But still, I can't imagine the air being very healthy there for a whole family to sleep...


Back outside, the villagers prepared a market for us. I wanted to be friendly and looked at every stall in detail.




After shopping we did our good-byes with the villagers.


All that led to us being too late for departure and meant we would hit darkness on our way back to the Camp. 🤦‍♂️



During our drive in the dark wilderness, a tree branch damaged the clutch of our tank and luckily our driver was also the camp mechanic and thus could do some on-the-spot repairs to get the machine going.


On the next day our stay at the Mara was already over, but I can say for sure that I'm gonna be back!



Thanks to José and his team to making our stay awesome 😊

If you wanna look at more (and better) pics or have a similar magical experience, here are Enkewa's contact details.
Website: https://www.enkewa.com
Instagram: @enkewacamp

Location: Masai Mara, Kenya

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