15:26, Sunday, 26 June, 2011

Happy Birthday Jacob Warstler! I hope it’s super, and I can’t believe that you are twenty-five. Craziness.

The party on Friday night was an experience! It was up at the lodge, which is where a lot of the safari drivers and rangers of the Mara Conservancy stay. There is a tiny little restaurant there called Sarafina’s. It is comprised of a very simple room, not very big, with round and rectangle tables covered with checkered tablecloths and crowded with people of handsomely dark skin, talking while turned towards a TV in the corner. At our table was everyone from camp except for Moses and Jorgio, who elected to stay behind. There was also a nice guy named Olanik (sp), a Kenyan named Alice who was born in England, and a character named Segurian (sp). Olanik liked my name, because it is similar to “Jana,” which means yesterday in Swahili, and I always use the comparison to help people know how to pronounce it. Every time I saw him after that, he would say, “Jana, sio leo!”, which means “Yesterday, not today!” :) Alice is an awesome person; she is nineteen and volunteers at the conservancy. She has the most excellent accent, a mix of British and Kenyan. She will be going to college in England in the fall, where she attended two years of high school and visits often. Alice advised me on whom to watch out for; she pointed to one guy and said that he seems very nice, but is really a jerk. Then she pointed to her friend Segurian who was sitting right next to her, and said that he is blunt and rude and says whatever is on his mind, but if you tell him to bugger off he will, and is really a nice guy. Segurian looks like Kalin Lucas, and does in fact seem like a tool, but he is rather funny. He calls Meg “Mista Meg”, and also randomly tells her that she looks like a porcupine, which makes her laugh.

For dinner we had goat and sukuma. Goat is very delicious, but very difficult to eat because of all the fat and little bones. Then we went over to the Canteen, which is a little courtyard area where people drink and dance. I wasn’t in the mood for a Tusker (the famous Kenyan beer), but finally relented and had a pineapple fanta when about five guys in a row commented on how I had nothing to drink. A kind man pulled out seats for Lia and I to sit in, and a friendly older gentleman named Kibuti came to chat with us. I really enjoyed his company before he became drunk; he downed about a liter of straight vodka - yuck! Before that he was telling me how we are all the same, regardless of skin color, and that Kenyans love visitors. He talked a tiny bit of Swahili with me, and explained that I speak much too properly for Kenya. My teacher is from Tanzania, where Swahili is a lot less broken than it is here. Once the vodka started to settle in, Kibuti became a broken record, insisting I must drink alcohol and repeating several times that he is the only plumber around. That might be good to know if we had any pipes. When Kibuti got up to use the choo, a guy named John sat down and began to talk to me. He is a Kikuyu from Nakuru, and he spoke very fluent English. He introduced me to his roommate Philip, and a friend in a bright yellow shirt named Solomon, whom they all call King Solomon. After a while, a big and wonderfully boisterous woman made Senny made Lia and I get up and dance, insisting we looked bored, even though dancing was the last thing either of us wanted to do. She showed us how to swing our hips, something that Meghan Spork knows is about impossible where I am concerned. But after we started, no one would let us sit down, possibly because we were two of six girls in a sea of about forty men. Dancing here is very different from dancing in America; the guy and girl stand about a foot apart and just kind of swing their hips and go from foot to foot, or some such strangeness. I liked dancing with Olanik best, because he jumped around from one foot to another, a move my stereotypically white self could actually manage. Meg has this great picture on her camera where Lia is looking at me with a plea for help because Kibuti had started to dance with her closely, and I am just looking at her with the most hilarious look of “I have no idea what to do!” on my face.

The best part was when the Maasai draped a shuka (the red cloak traditionally worn by them) over Meg, and placed red beads around her shoulders, so that minus the long blonde hair she looked like a real Maasai Mama. They called her “Nimeshapua,” which in Maasai means “she who brings happiness to others”. She looked beautiful. And it was a riot because the DJ played hyena whoops and giggles in between songs for her, truly an honor as the Maasai are not usually fond of hyenas; they seem to find it very amusing that anyone would come here to study them.

As the night wore on, a big ranger in a green suit became hopelessly drunk, and moved in a constant forwardly directed can-can, swinging his arms forward and backward in alternation with his legs. Joe, it reminded me of when we played “Perpetual Motion” on our violins; he just never stopped moving! I sat for a bit and met a Maasai named Patrick, who was very inquisitive about the outside world, asking me many questions about America. It was a pleasure to talk with him. He showed me pictures of his wife and two children on his phone, and promised to friend me on “the Facebook.”

When Segurian started to knock his head against Lia’s and mine in turn, telling us repeatedly not to fear him and trying to get us to dance with him, Dave came over and pulled him away. We left after that, because things were just getting too sloppy. But I was glad to have experienced a real Kenyan dance party; it actually turned out to be quite fun.

We returned to camp at 1:30, exhausted. We only stayed out so late because the rain gauge was already over 6 mm, the limit for going out on obs lest the cars should get stuck on the crazily muddy roads.