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Published: September 12th 2019
Arrived back in Mto wa Mbu on Sunday evening from Moshi after an absence of 3 years since our first time here. It seems largely unchanged apart from a new bank, a roadside coffee cart where you can get real coffee (catering to the safari crowd) and a huge new upmarket service station & restaurant/bar with outdoor tables on a fresh, green (wait for it,,,,) LAWN! Both of these last two cater for the safari crowd and a few well-heeled locals, as their prices are out of the reach of most of the people here. Maybe now we’ll see some safari-types come out from behind the gates of their lodges? (We KNOW you’re in there!). We tried out the restaurant at the servo.
We are living back in the same house as last time. It’s in the grounds of a Lutheran hospital and has three bedrooms for visiting medical people (and us!). We share the facilities except for our bedroom, but there’s no-one else here at the moment except for the housekeeper who we nick-named Rafiki last time because she is friendly and babbles away to us in Swahili as if we understood! It’s so peaceful here away from the
busyness of the town with all It’s hustle and bustle. People in town remember us from three years ago! We are surrounded at the back by a banana plantation. There are many different types of banana grown here - there is more to bananas than Cavendish and Lady Finger! It’s about 150m out to the main road that goes from Arusha to the Serengeti. That’s where we meet safari 4WD’s, monster safari trucks that travel all over Africa, tall slow haulage trucks, overcrowded, overloaded and garishly painted dalla dalla vans touting for business, bajajis (tuk tuks), motor bikes, the Maasai and countless other pedestrians, . . . . and baboons (sometimes all at once). We feel at home, in major contrast to our first days last time when the thought of living here independently was quite daunting.
We have reconnected with our friend “Big” Emmanuel (there were two), who we met as a street seller and who helped us organise some interesting trips last time. We were sad to learn that he had been arrested and jailed earlier this year, on suspicion of being homosexual, as it’s illegal to be gay in Tanzania. He was rounded up by a
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Made-up-on-the-spot salad for when you don’t have lettuce (or a fridge!). We stocked up on a few non-perishable staples (e.g. canned fish, pasta and sauces) in Arusha before arriving in Mto wa Mbu. local official on who-knows-what evidence and spent a month locked up before bribes were paid to release him. If you thought Australia was bad when we had our gay marriage debate, there’s an even longer way to go here.
We’ve hooked into the local delights already! Last night we went to Gloria’s for a banana pancakes and Konyagi dinner, and on to a short cultural dance/acrobatics show at a local safari campsite (more mzungus behind walls). It was enjoyable but being there reminded us why we’ve chosen to live in the community and fend for ourselves. This evening we headed out to the weekly Maasai Market at Engaruka Corner, a few km east of Mto wa Mbu township. This is a massive affair, full of colour and noise. The market stalls are mostly at ground level on tarps. I’ve never seen so many piles of second hand clothes and shoes, apparently all first world cast-offs that find their way to Africa. Townspeople, villagers and Maasai people mix freely throughout the market (as they do in most aspects of life here), but it’s the Maasai who stand out as always in their distinctive red or blue patterned blankets, the women
with loads of ear and neck jewellery and the warriors always with their sticks and machetes. We sampled the BBQ goat, killed and dismembered on site (aging of meat is over-rated according to the locals!) and roasted on sticks over a charcoal fire on the ground. Talk about connected to your food - there’s no consumer education required here!
There are Maasai who live in a boma not far from the Bandari school at Majengo. We see them come and go all day at Bandari, and they bring their cattle to graze on whatever grass or green feed they can find. Most of the farmers around Majengo are small croppers (bananas, fruit and vegetables) who do not welcome cattle trampling and eating their crops. This is the same reason that the Bandari land has a barbed wire fence around it, but the Maasai have on occasions cut it to gain access. Right now there is a young Maasai bull running with our Bandari cattle. Three Maasai came to see about it today, and will have to pay compensation before it is released to them. On Tuesday, the Majengo village secretary came by to ask if we knew anything about
a full-on fight between some Maasai and local farmers that had occurred earlier about the very same issue. Apparently there were some serious injuries. This is a conflict of cultures that has gone on for centuries (as told in the previous blog post to this one).
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