Jiggers and Bushmen

Yesterday morning I slept. It was great. We were supposed to be working on our school assignment but I was halfway done so I decided to sleep instead.

After lunch we had community service. The project was planting trees for the camp nursery (same as last session) so the combined summer students got to do something else. We collected seed pods from one of the trees near the classroom building. After reaching, jumping, climbing and collecting as many pods as possible we sat down and shucked the pods to collect the seeds. We spent about an hour removing and collecting the seeds. We found Nairobi flies. Well it may have been one because as soon as I found one Courtney was like "oh yea, I didn't kill the one I found..." Still Nairobi flies are nasty and it was really unnerving to find because they expel acid when they are squished and it causes a chemical burn. 

When we were done with our activity the other students were still working. We looked at them and I considered joining but I didn't feel like working anymore. Instead of helping we just goofed off. I don't even really know what we did but it was really funny.

In the eveneing El discovered she had a jigger so watching Molly remove it became our entertainment for the night. Five of us followed El to Molly's house to observe and by the end I think there were eight of us crowded in there. Postal had to go and get Andrew because he was drugged up on tranquilizers (prescribed by the doctor here to help combat another bad medicine that was prescribed) and Andrew was afraid that El's jigger bite was in an inappropriate place. Jigger bites are pretty much always on feet or toes. Because Andrew was pretty drugged up he was making the funniest sounds in reaction to watching Molly remove the jigger. Removing the jigger involved using a needle to pierce the callous, a pin to open up the callous and then fingers and tweezers to squeeze the callous to make sure that the jigger's egg sac was completely removed. In the middle of squeezing the eggs sac out Andy was like "it's like having a baby!" and Molly started laughing so hard that she had to stop what she was doing to recover. It's hard to sum up why it was so great but it really was very entertaining :D

After the jigger removal there was a dum dum party in my banda. Courtney, one of my roommates, brought a huge bag of dum dums and so a bunch of people came over to enjoy some. I asked for a butterscotch and they all called me an old lady. Then they found as many butterscotch dum dums as they could and stuck them in my hair so that I had a hairpiece of dum dums. I don't know why people were so hyper last night. This group is awesome though. They're always doing ridiculous things.

Today we went to visit a bushman settlement. It was mostly an indescribable experience because I feel like whatever I say I'll be missing a huge chunk of it but I'll try... So the first thing that hits you when you walk into camp is the number of bones and skulls hanging in the trees. There were pig/warthog jaws, baboon skulls, and antelope horns adorning the bigger trees in the area. After passing the skulls and a group of women and children we walked up a little hill and sat down on a rocky outcrop.

On the outcrop we met the men. The men were dressed in baboon skins with old american clothes underneath. They wore either beaded headbands or headdresses made of baboon skins or zebra manes. They lined up, shook our hands and said hi. When I got through the introduction line the first thing I saw was a baboon carcass hanging in the tree. It was cut in half, partially shaved and partially skinned. They said they had killed it the day before. Yohanna touched it by accident and said "oh, that's still soft!"

Once I managed to look away from the baboon our translator talked to us about the weapons that the bushmen use. They hunt with bows and don't use spears. They have a variety of types of bows and can shoot prey up to 100 yards away. As far as arrows, they have three types. The first type is a wooden arrow that doesn't have a metal arrowhead. This wooden arrow is used to hunt small prey. The second type of arrow has a flattened metal arrowhead much like the typical type of arrow seen in the US. It's used to shoot medium-sized game. The third type of arrow had a metal head but it is skinny with vicious-looking spikes on the edge. The arrowhead of this arrow is dipped in poison and used to shoot large prey. When you shoot large prey the poison spreads quickly through their body, especially if they are running. If you use the poison arrows you can use the meat but not the blood of the animal because it contains the poison.

After they explained how they hunt they showed us how they make fire. It was the same way that the Maasai make fire so I just wandered around, played with a bow that they had given us to look at, and stared at the baboon. I really liked the bow. It was nicely made and flexible with strings made of veins and decorative bands of animals pelt. Oh yea, and the bushmen pulled out a pipe and some pot and started to smoke as they were showing students how to make a fire. They were so aggressive about smoking; they would argue with each other, snatch the pipe out of each other’s hands and take angry drags on the pipe. Molly was really mad because we had asked them not to smoke while we were there. Luckily they didn’t offer any weed to any students because then things definitely would have gone downhill really quickly.

Once everyone who wanted to try to make a fire had tried we checked out the living areas of the bush people. They had examples of dry season houses and wet season houses set up. The wet season houses were little huts made of leaves from the plants in the area combined with bits of fabric and plastic. The dry season houses were actually not houses at all; they were just little clearings with fire pits and mats.

Next the bush people wanted to show us some of their dances. They danced in a circle similar to the way the local school children do. One person was in the middle at a time and other people ran in and out and then they ran in a circle. The thing that they did that was really unique at one point the women moved to the outside and the men grabbed the tail of the baboon pelt on the guy in front of him. The line of men then snaked their way around in the middle of the circle and then they broke out and did a small dance on their own. The little children kept trying to join the dancing and getting chased out of the group. The cutest little kid was a boy with just a t-shirt on and a beaded bands around his waist, knees and ankles. Someone commented that they liked how he was dressed in beads instead of clothes. After they had completed their dance they invited all of the students in to dance. I stayed on the outside, took pictures and laughed at the other students.

After the dancing the women lead us off and showed us how they collect roots. They use roots for food as well as a water source during the dry season. The root that I tried mostly tasted like nothing (water?) but it had a slightly weird and a little bitter taste. It was very wet and I can see how it would be a good source of water when all of the main water sources have dried up. After we were done trying roots Cecelia came up with a baobab pod and Christian opened it. Inside the baobab pod there was a bunch of seeds covered in white stuff. The white stuff was dry… Pretty much the consistency of the dried marshmallows that are in Lucky Charms. I have no idea how to describe what it tasted like but it was really good. Sweetish with a little bit of a tartness… Yummy. That’s all I know for sure.

When we got back to camp the bushmen were showing everyone how to shoot their bows. A lot of people were terrible at it and it was hilarious; they would try really hard to pull back the bow and then the arrow would flop right to the ground when they released it. *News update: one of the guys just came into the dining hall and announced that he had had solid poop. This is a huge deal because he’s had horrible diarrhea for days. He had a horrifying experience of diarrhea in the bush this morning that I walked into the middle of the story of and almost puked. It was also the funniest poop story I’ve heard here yet.* When I got a bow I had a really good shot and hit the target. I was really proud because a bunch of the bushmen shook my hand and congratulated me. I was so excited that I got to shoot a bow that I bought one. I’d been looking at bows in the duka but I didn’t feel like they were very significant so I hadn’t gotten one yet. I ended up getting a small bow with genet fur decorations and two wooden small animal arrows. I love them.

After we left the bushman settlement we stopped at a lodge. They had a bathroom with a little tiny pitcher of soap. It was so cute! They also had a bar area, a pool and a series of fishponds with waterfalls.

From the lodge we walked out towards Lake Eyasi. Lake Eyasi is a saltwater lake and was very shrunken from the dry season like Lake Manyara. The horrible part about the area around Lake Eyasi was that people used mosquito nets to fish so they would catch large amounts of fish. The problem with this method of fishing was that if they didn’t get to the nets while the fish were fresh they would just dump the fish on the shore. There were huge piles of dead fish everywhere in the open land where the lake had receded. The funny part was that Kioko picked up a dead fish and put it in the straps of my backpack so when I took it off to grab something out of a pocket I had a disgusting dead fish staring me in the face. I got Gasper to remove it for me. I have touched plenty of dead things but dead fish are so disgusting! Kioko was just cracking up in the background. Then he told me there was also a fish in my backpack. When Courtney went to check he picked one up and was going to put it in the pocket. Luckily I saw what he was doing out of the corner of my eye and stopped him. Kioko is my favorite teacher. He’s quiet but he says and does really funny things if you pay attention.


At dinner Ninah asked me how I like the baboon. I was eating beef that was delicious and he insisted that it was the baboon we'd seen in the bushman camp. Then Molly was eating fish and he insisted that was baboon too. I said "baboon of the sea?" and he just laughed. Christian piped in and said that baby baboons have white meat though. Then, even though we knew we weren't eating baboon, it wasn't quite as funny. I'm not sure how he knows that. He says he's never eaten baboon.