Selela

It has been quite some time since I have updated this. My apologies. I have been out in the bush. For the last two weeks we have been in Selela, a small village that lies just along the Rift Valley about 3ish hours (possibly a bit more- the road is pretty bad- rocky, dirt etc so it depends on the road condition for driving time) from Arusha.

Selela is mostly full of Maasai and Chagga tribal peoples.  There's a strange dichotomy in the village due to the opposite tribal cultures that live in the same area. The Chagga are traditionally farmers while the Maasai rarely farm and are only concerned with their cattle (and occasionally goats).  The two tribes, despite living in the same village, have little interaction. Most of the Maasai live a ways outside of the village center and only come into town on market day or to go to the guest house (which has a generator and so cold soda, beer, and konyagi).  The Chagga on the other hand live all over the village with their farms lined up along the sides of the mountains.

Selela was beautiful. Now that it is rainy season everything has begun to bloom and there was green everywhere. We camped just along the irrigation canal the village had built to bring water to their farms. It was a thirty minute walk from the village next to a banana tree forest and in the jungle clearing of the woods that bordered the banana trees. Vervet monkeys filled the trees around us, making noise incessently all day and night long. But just as you learn to block out city noises, we soon didn't hear the monkeys either. Baboons were every where as well.

The baboons were actually really scary. They are quite large, the males especially were probably close to ninety pounds. Baboons eat meat and feel threatened if you venture into their territory. There were multiple times when we went exploring through the woods by our camp  that the baboons would start screaming. I'm not sure if they were angry were not, but I always turned around and headed a different direction.  Once we saw them all start dropping out of the trees and coming towards us on the ground, it was then we decided it was time to head back to camp.

The monkeys were so cool though. We would throw them orange and mango peels. They would come and snatch up the peels then scamper back up into the trees with them before anyone (or monkey) or could steal their treat from them. Then they would sit on a branch just above our heads eating their peels with relish.

There were also a decent amount of toucans, which were SO cool . I totally love them.

Also, the food in Selela was phenomenal. I loved it. We had so many fresh avocados, tomatoes, bananas, and mangos. Lots of lentils, and rice, and even chicken- twice!

The first week in Selela we vaccinated chickens. This involved eating breakfast at 6 or 6:30 every morning then heading out to the farms to get the chickens before they left their coops for the day. The Maasai don't normally keep too many chickens, but the Chagga had a number of them.  I love doing chicken vaccinations because you get to see how so many people live. We get to see their houses, their farms, and how they live on a day to day bases. Many people here keep their chickens in their houses with them and sometimes other animals as well.

One day while vaccinating chickens, a Maasai woman found a red spitting cobra in her boma underneath her bed. The African spitting cobras are the world's largest spitting cobras and are among the world's most poisonous snakes. The snake was roughly a meter long ( I was not there but I had the whole thing described very vividly to me and I was shown pictures).  If bitten, someone won't die immediately, but they would need medical care asap. If they were to not receive it (As in, the closest hospital to Selela is over an hour away driving and very few people have cars or forms of transportation other than walking), they would die. The woman managed to kill it with a rock and threw it out of her house. Some men then built a fire to burn the snake (I'm not sure why they did this).   It's scary to know that snakes like this are common all over northern Tanzania.  Pythons are common as are many other dangerous snakes.

 I have only seen one big snake since being here and that was an injured one lying in the middle of the road. Harry, the driver for GSC, tried to drive over its head to kill it (following along with the popular opinion that an injured venomous snake is too dangerous to leave alive because it will attack anything it can) but we were unsuccessful.  As we were driving away we saw a bunch of children running up to it with sticks. Hopefully they managed to finish the job without being hurt.  The pictures of the squashed looking white snake on Picasa are of this snake.