Mutana! (Greetings from Hadzabe)

It has been a while since the last post, and so much has happened! I'll give a brief overview here because I think the pictures give a pretty good job of showing how incredible the last few weeks have been.

After one week of class at the United Kenya Club, we spent a weekend climbing Mt. Longonot, a 9,700 ft. volcano, and listening to live music at the Rift Valley Music Festival, which took place at Fisherman's Camp, Lake Naivasha. The hike was pretty amazing; we saw steam rising out of the still-active crater, and on the way down from the mountain, we saw giraffe, cape buffalo, and impala stampeding away from us. After lunch, we drove about an hour and a half to Lake Naivasha to see the Rift Valley Music Festival sessions; a preview of a three-day music festival which will take place over Easter weekend. The show we saw was a little underwhelming, with only four small bands, and a small crowd of about 200 people. It was still nice to see live music, and the few people that we met at the festival were excited to meet and talk with us. The following morning, we went on a short guided boat ride to view a few members of Lake Naivasha's infamous hippo population. The hippos were napping and staying cool when we saw them, but still looked much bigger and more intimidating than i was expecting.

After our second week of classes, we embarked on an eight hour bus ride to the Yaeda valley in Tanzania to visit and learn from a hunter-gatherer people, the Hadzabe. The Hadzabe have lived in the area in and surrounding the Yaeda valley for at least 24,000 years. Archaeologists have found evidence of a hunter-gatherer group living in the same area dating back 130,000 years, though no evidence links this older group of people directly to the Hadzabe. While they still practice a subsistence based economy, the Hadzabe are by no means "stuck in the past" or "primitive." In fact, I found myself in awe of how progressive, open, and free the Hadzabe lifestyle was. People are free to leave and return to the group at will, marry whenever and whomever they please, and have access to essentially any material goods and amenities such as standardized, government funded schools and healthcare clinics. The Hadzabe, however, have chosen to continue their semi-nomadic way of life rather than follow the Tanzanian government's wishes to "develop," modernize, and pursue a sedentary, agriculturally based lifetstyle. One of the main purposes of this trip was to learn about the pressure that the Hadzabe are feeling from the government, tourism, and other groups of people such as the Tatoga and Iraqw pastoralists. The Hadzabe are losing their land relatively quickly because of these pressures, but because of the egalitarian, non-confrontational nature of Hadza culture, they have not been able to stand up for themselves very well. Several NGO's are currently working with the Hadzabe in an effort to stop the loss of land, and educate them in dealing with the Tanzanian government. This trip may turn out to be the highlight of this semester.

We will being our three-week long urban homestay tomorrow, and I will have more regular access to the internet (hopefully(, so look for another post soon. The rains seem to have begun (lots of thunder and heavy rain last night), which is very exciting. Hope all is well with everyone!