Minority Groups

I’m A Gypsy?

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Back in Prague, doors open…a gypsy girl sits down beside me at a bus stop…flirting…wanting me to listen to lively music in her cell phone. I smile and she is encouraged…she smiles widely…waving back at me through the windows of her departing bus.

Later after many bad looks from faces peering at me through narrow eyes, I finally realize I am being taken for Romany…in this country not a good thing for me…it is jarring…who am I…how do I look to these people? In this country, Gypsies are regarded with hostility and open discrimination and on a train to Krakow I experience part of the why when a gypsy family corners me in the hallway… aggressively yelling into my face…demanding money…no way…I am determined.

Later at Oswiecim Poland, called Auschwitz by the Germans, I find out that half a million gypsies were incinerated during World War II by the Nazis.

Bob’s Thai Village Visit

Posted on by Laughingnomad

While Jana and I were playing with Chinese teenagers in Ruili in the south of Yunnan, Bob spent some time in an ethnic village in the mountains in Issan Province southeast of Chiang Mai in Thailand. The people were Thai but smaller and darker…probably with a Lao or Cambodian background… and were very concerned about getting too much sun because darker skin color is discriminated against by other Thais.

Bob said he learned something about Thai culture from the people in this village when he hired a pick-up to take him to a Khmer wat (temple) high in the mountains…only to realize that nearly the entire village was going along when he saw them all piling into the back. And of course before the day was over when they all got hungry he was expected to buy the food! After a couple days feeling like he had been gouged, as he puts it, he discovered that it is the custom for the person with the most wealth and social rank (and foreigners are often perceived to be in this category since they have enough money to travel) to foot the bill.

Relationships in Thailand are governed by connections between the phuu yai (big person) and phuu nawy (little person). Ranking is defined by things like age, wealth, status and personal and political power. The phuu nawy is supposed to defer to the phuu yai and show obedience and respect. So Bob got to ride in the front seat of the pick-up but in turn he had to pay for the pick-up and the dinner. While eating dinner (three barbequed chickens and several spicy papaya salads) he received the choicest portions and they wouldn’t let him sit on the ground but gave him a prime position on the mat. The idea is that whatever wealth you come into is to be shared with the less fortunate and this especially applies to friends and family.

The school aged kids just stared at Bob…considering him a novelty…the little ones were frightened as they often are told by their mothers that if they don’t behave they will be eaten by a farang, a semi-derogatory term for a Western foreigner!

One of the villagers was an elderly blind woman in her 80’s who had never seen a farang so she wanted to feel Bob with her hands. She felt the hair on his arms and, touching each of his fingers and exclaimed, astonished, that the “farang hand was just like the Thai hand”…which cracked up all the bystanders. Bob had no idea what was going on until someone translated. He was very touched by her discovery that a farang was not a monster.

The next day Bob had an encounter with Thai justice when he was stopped on his rented motocycle by a police barricade. Apparently the motorbike license had expired. Three hours later and 500 baht poorer, the key to the motorbike was returned and he was allowed to go on his way.

After a few days kayaking and biking on Koh Chang, an island in the south of Thailand, Bob spent Christmas and the next day on a bus back to Chiang Mai. There he picked up a plane for the short hop back to Kunming, China and met Jana and me at the Camellia Hotel.

Conversations In Tiger Leaping Gorge

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Wednesday Dec 11
In Old Town Lijiang, Bob joined us for breakfast at our hotel at 9am; met Li at her hotel at 10:30 for minibus trip up the gorge. Bus had no shocks so was a very bumpy miserable ride; Bob uncomfortable on narrow road overlooking the gorge. Drove all the way to Walnut Grove, which is the beginning of the Gorge and had lunch there before the trip back…everyone else but the driver and I got out and walked a couple stretches. Caught the driver rummaging through our stuff couple times while waiting for the walkers. Later Bob said that Li had warned him not to leave money in the bus while they walked.

Talked to a young French walker on his way through to Walnut Grove…he had been working for six months in a L’Oreal factory near Shanghai in order to learn Chinese. I asked him about a working visa…said he thought he was on tourist visa…his supervisors obviously paying off the immigration officials to allow him with his engineering background to work in the factory. His Chinese was great though!

On the way back, Li told us a few things about the minority people…that for the Naxi the Snow mountain is God…that when couples divorce the woman is no longer desirable by other men but that if her husband dies she is desireable. Marriages are popular in the winter.

For the Yi people, the sun is God so they live on the top of the mountains near the Sun God…but they are lazy and when they get money they drink alcohol. There are 30,000 Naxi people in Lijiang.

She went on to say that the government is poor but the leaders get all the money from tourism. The sons of the leaders get to go to school in your country, she said. Almost all the businesses in Old Lijiang are run by the Han Chinese she said…the Naxi are able only to rent out a room or two in their homes. The Naxi also drive the taxis.

Thursday Dec 12
Sakura was trying to heat up the restaurant with a charcoal burner but it produced so much smoke we had breakfast across the canal while listening to Blues Music in the Delta Cafe.

Later, Jana and I went to Sakura’s Bar and…partnerless…watched “American Sweethearts.” A group of very loud Chinese tourists came upstairs where we were watching the movie…we had to turn up the TV to earsplitting volume in order to hear. Seems to be a trait…talking in movies, concerts…any public entertainment venues…

Friday Dec 13-14
Bob took a bus to Kunming and then flew to Chiang Mai Thailand.

Echo & Li…Competitors

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Monday Dec 9 2002
In Old Town Lijiang, we are woken up by a knock at the hotel door at 8am. Two couples from Taiwan were on their way to Zhondian with a driver and wanted to know how we found the city. Then we breakfasted at Sakura Cafe.

Later, we moved to Mr. Yang’s Inn, a brand new beautiful guesthouse right on the canal where, playing with Fifi, his Lijiang dog and Debu, a pure white 3 month old Beijing puppy, we saw a large group of young people with chef’s hats on walking through the streets…we followed them until they ended up at an orphanage with children whose parents (600 people) did not survive the 1996 earthquake and more than 16,000 people were injured. Turns out we had happened onto a celebration.

On the way we passed a group of men building a traditional Naxi structure…with pegs…no nails. They had a roast pig on the spit…a traditional way to celebrate the birth of a new building, we are told.

Dinner at Sakuras…a western hang-out…guy at table next to us was from Eugene. I said we made a big mistake going home in February! He laughed and said he wasn’t going home until spring to avoid the Oregon winter.

Bob arrived in Lijiang from Dali by 1pm on bus but we didn’t connect. We were communicating via email; he told me to meet him the next day at noon in the Square. Bob couldn’t follow my directions to our hotel so he got one of his own in a Naxi Family House for Y80 or about $10 per night; tiny but very clean with 24-hour hot water.

In the meantime, Jana had gone to one internet cafe and I had gone to another at Sekura’s because there was no room for me. Thirsty, I drank a 40 oz beer while answering email…and feeling quite good, I emailed Jana and told her she should join me in another beer. Later she told me she laughed out loud reading my email.

Tuesday Dec 10
Breakfast in the cold courtyard of our hotel…Naxi fried bread with chives, rice porridge with pork, steamed bun, eggs, stir fried cabbage and coffee. I worked on my journal sitting in my heated bed while Jana washed her hair.

Later, Jana and I ran into Echo and invited her to eat with us…meeting Bob in the town square. Jana and I didn’t know it, but Bob had arranged for us to meet with Li, a Naxi minority woman Bob had hired to take us to the gorge the next day and to take us to a Naxi music concert after dinner. Echo, a city-bred Chinese Han from Beijing, bristled when Li walked up to our table in the restaurant. Li tried to talk Bob and I into watching a Chinese play instead of listening to Naxi music…the previous client of hers from Illinois liked the play much better than the music, she said! Echo, whispering in my ear, insisted she just wanted the higher commission on the play but we persisted in getting to listen to the music. I would find out later that Han Chinese look down on the ethnic minorities…feeling very superior to them. And Echo was horning in on one of the few jobs Naxi people can get that isn’t scut work…as tour guides.

Then there was a mixup on the seats at the concert…some Chinese patrons made us get up and give our seats to them…then Bob questioned whether we actually had Y50 seats…so Li offered for us to move up to the front. But as the concert had already started and we didn’t want to disturb the others, we declined.

Don’t know why we bothered with the consideration…others were coming and going and talking out loud with each other as they pleased during the whole concert.

Zhondian to Baishuitai

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Friday Dec 6 2002
There were no street lights so we walked the equivalent of several blocks to the Zhongdian bus station in the dark to catch the 7:50am bus for Baishuitai. While waiting for the bus, we ate a steamed bun with chili and garlic purchased from a girl at her little stand.

I sat with the luggage while Jana finally figured out which bus was ours. We boarded the local “delivery and distribution” vehicle; aisles and roof full of sacks of unknown contents…but no chickens.

Many colorful ethnic minority folks, some of them the big-hatted Yi, got onto the bus as it climbed higher and higher across the mountain passes above 3200 meter Zhuandian. As families got on the bus everyone already on would greet them and smile.

One man and his family got on in the middle of a very small village…he sat in front of me and turned around from time to time to look at me. I nearly jumped out of my skin when he suddenly turned and yelled “hello” right at me! I laughed and he laughed. He opened a small round tin of yellow powder and sniffed it up his nose…what do you think it is I whispered to Jana…dunno…might be some kind of stimulant she said under her breath. He was fascinated with my face and kept looking at my writing. Two Chinese women so far have told me I look Chinese but I don’t know if that is why he was looking at me. Jana and I showed him pictures of our families. It was so cold on the bus you could see whirls of everyone’s breath condensing into the air.

The family got off the bus in a desolate place with the woman carrying the heavy sleeping blankets on her back and disappeared into the mountains….to visit relatives or going home we wondered?

Going over another pass we looked down to see some small buildings and some sheep roaming deep in a canyon. It reminded me of one of my father�s summer sheep camps in Oregon with a cook’s wagon and the sheep dogs hanging around the campfire…warm and comforting…deep within a small solitary place with the mountains looming all around.

A colorfully dressed Yi minority woman with a huge rhomboid head piece got on the bus with her husband two small children. A man and his little boy with shaved head and tuft of hair in front got on…I wanted to stick his dirt encrusted feet and body into a nice warm bathtub. The father sang/chanted a wonderful ethnic song the entire time he was on the bus….completely unselfconscious…seemingly oblivious of everyone around him…lost in reverie.

Jana remembered that it was almost Pearl Harbor Day. The bombs fell on the Philippines on December 8, the same day as they fell on December 7 in Hawaii on the other side of the dateline. We talked about the War that seemed so close to us now on this side of the world. Jana described what she knew about the war in the Philippines…the country where she spent two years in the peace corps after college. The topography of the countryside in and near Baishuitai where the local Naxi cultural people live reminded her of the sub cultural group-the Kankanai-in the mountains where she taught English.

When we got off the bus in Sanba, at the foot of the Baishuitai Plateau, a Chinese tourist from Taiwan that had been sitting on the bus in front of Jana paid Y10 or $1 of our entrance fee into the limestone terraces because the clerk had no change. “No, No,” I yelled as he disappeared up the hill on his day trip from Zhongdian to see the stone terraces.

Saturday Dec 7
We hiked up the hill and behind the Stone Terraces. The gorgeous pools of blue/white water is full of calcium phosphate and forms crystals as it runs over the edge of the beautiful stone �terraces� that are resplendent in the sunlight. The area is considered very sacred by the Naxi (pronounced Nashi) people who live in the town. Jana was blessed by incense as an old man showed her how to throw rice into a hole in one of the terraces as an offering-the privilege for doing so, 1 yuan.

We had lunch with Audrey, a young Naxi woman. Then Jana walked with her to another village and down a ravine to a waterfall. On the way back, the two of them walking together seemed to catch the imagination of a farmer they were following who was switching his cows up the deep ravine to the village. The farmer turned and wanted to know what time it was in America. Jana thought it was about 4am there since it was about 4pm where she was in China. Then the farmer and Audry talked…she gestured to Jana that China and America were just opposite each other. Jana was touched by the old man’s interest in the idea of the time difference and the fact that they were on opposite sides of the world with light on one side and dark on the other.

The electricity was out that night in the village so Audry cooked us a small dinner of vegetables rice and meat with charcoal and we ate by candlelight in her little one room cafe that also served as her home/bedroom. We admired her entrepreneurial spirit and desire to be independent but I suspect that it has also caused her grief because as we were leaving the next morning I asked her how she got the scars on her nose and face. She answered “fighting” as she raked her fingernails through the air.

We stayed the night a few feet up the street in a little unheated guesthouse that we never did find out the name of but was owned by Audry’s sister-in- law. We were in the middle of three rooms and became concerned about the knotholes and spaces between the slats that counted for walls when the other two rooms eventually became occupied by several young Chinese men later in the evening. In the middle of the night I chose not to walk up the hill at the back of the guesthouse to a smelly outhouse with squat toilet but instead used a small red pail with a lid provided for such use in the room.

We were told the bus to Lijiang would leave in the dark at 7:30am (all of China is one time zone) but at 9am we were still sitting by the stove in a cafe where the bus was to pick up it’s local travelers to Lijiang. The cowboy driver-complete with cowboy hat-leaned on the horn to let us know we should get on the bus…then he turned off the motor and we sat for another half hour before taking off with no breakfast.

On the way we visited with a small well-dressed young woman from Beijing whose English name was Echo who had gotten on the bus just outside Baishuitai. Later we found out that the reason the bus was so late leaving was that she and her fellow travelers had asked the bus to wait for them in the morning so they would have time to climb up to the limestone terraces!

We passed through a small village with children lined up by the sides of the road with musicians playing some music and waving some flags. Echo told us that young men spend two or three years in the army and they are welcomed back home this way because their army service is considered very important to the country.

Zhondian aka Shangri-La

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Bob took a flight south from Kunming to Mangshi and then on by bus to Ruili near the Burma border.

Jana and I left Kunming on a Yunnan Airlines flight to the village of Zhongdian, a mainly Tibetan town near the Tibet border. The view of the sun glinting off the snow-capped 13 peaks of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain Range out of the plane window on the way to Zhongdian was breathtaking. The highest peak is 5596 meters and runs 35km from north to south and 12 km from east to west. Zhongdian, 198 km north of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, at 3200 meters high, marks the start of the Tibetan world.

Jana and I took a cold taxi ride to the unheated Tibet Hotel and booked a $2 double room on the second floor with squat toilets next door. We dumped our luggage and went to the freezing cold hotel coffee shop across the parking lot for breakfast. A young Western couple came in about 15 minutes after we had ordered. We waited about 45 minutes and finally asked the waitress where our food was. After much back and forthing it was finally determined that our breakfast had been served to and eaten by the young couple. He was very apologetic but she kept saying to the waitress “well, you brought it to our table!” So we had to reorder and wait again for our food.

Then we warmed up awhile in the sun on the hotel veranda before walking through Zhongdian-buying our regular supply of necessities- toilet paper and water.

We laughed when we came upon a sparsely stocked department store with Santa Claus singing jingle bells inside the front door. We looked for but could not find a towel to buy as the hotel charged 50 cents touse a towel for the hot water shower that is only available from 7pm to11pm.

Any place in the shade was freezing cold but we were warm as long as we were under the sun. We ate a late lunch at the Tibet Cafe where two young Tibetan waitresses were huddled around a charcoal stove. We talked to a youngish German woman with a small child-the only other customer in the cafe-who had been living in Zhongdian and studying tourism. She suggested that instead of going south to Lijiang on the main road, we take the road from Zhongdian to Baishuitai and then on to Lijiang. The road follows the Yangtzse River through Tiger Leaping Gorge. We looked at all the maps and pictures hanging on the walls; read the travelers tip books and laughed at some of the stories-some of them not so nice about the Tibet Hotel. We ate noodles and shared hot Chocolate cake.

Jana went back to the Tibet Hotel to crawl into bed and get warm with the electric hot pad under the bottom sheet while I walked several miles looking for the Gyalthang Dzong Hotel, a US joint-venture hotel, which was nowhere to be found. After a cold day, we spent a cozy evening reading in our warm beds heated by an electric pad under the sheets.

Thursday Dec 5
The next morning we stayed in our warm beds and worked on our journals and read guidebooks. We looked for a heated restaurant for breakfast but found none. Finally we we found the Camel Cafe on the main drag through town where Jana had Banana Oatmeal Porridge with condensed milk and I had the infamous backpacker Banana Pancake with sugar. Now I know why banana pancakes are so popular with young backpackers…with no syrup the bananas make the pancakes a little moist and sweet.

We found the bus station and bought tickets to the Baishuitai limestone plateau. Then we took the Number 3 bus to the Ganden Sumtseling Gompa-a 300 year old Tibetan monastery complex with around 600 monks. The monastery is considered the most important in southwest China.

Jana had been given a crystal by a friend and was asked to bury it as close to Tibet as we could get. So we spent some time out on the hill behind the monastary looking for an appropriate place when we came upon two old men fingering some beads. Jana chose to drop the crystal among some carved rocks under a tree behind the old men while I recorded the event with her camera. Satisfied with mission number two, we made our way through the maze of buildings, back down to the road, visiting with several young monks along the way…taking picture of one looking out a window with his little dog and another on a cell phone.

We ate dinner at a Tibetan style hotel next to the monastary….sliced sauteed (dry cooked) Yak meat, which was delicious, an eggplant and tomato dish and what turned out to be lamb neck bones on curried rice.

In the evening the Tibet Hotel coffee shop was full of smoking Chinese guys so we drank hot lemonade at the Snow Drift Cafe across the street from the Hotel, sat on a couch in front of their charcoal stove and visited with two girls, Phyllis (German but living in Switzerland) and Alex (English but living in the States and attending Ohio State in Columbus) who were on vacation from their MBA exchange program in Shanghai. We exchanged travel tips for awhile and then fell into a conversation about the Chinese economic system or lack therof. I gave them my book, �The Coming Collapse of China� in exchange for some chocolate and Jana heated up a sewing needle with a match so one of the girls could puncture a blister on her foot after her two day trek through Tiger
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At the end of the evening, the cafe dog that had befriended us earlier fell asleep on the couch between Jana and me. We looked at the walls full of pictures of Chinese tourists that the cafe owner had previously led on tours through Tibet. We watched the Tibetan waitress playing with a Chinese puzzle. Then we reluctantly walked back across the street to our cold hotel room.

A stay in this town followed by a bus trip through Baishuitai, along the Tiger Leaping Gorge, to Lijiang would top my list of the ten best places to travel…in good weather.

China’s Secrets I Will Never Know

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Major Cities We Visited

“The opening up of China is a stirring idea,” Lonely Planet says. A foreigner traveling alone today is privileged to see more of China than almost any Chinese has seen in his or her lifetime. I wondered what we could learn-traveling alone. Our images and ideas of China have surely been contradictory and distorted over time.

In the years of the Cultural Revolution after 1966 tens of millions of Chinese had become the instruments of their own terror…a million were killed and some 30 million or more were brutally persecuted and displaced or starved to death. How could so many people be so led?

China has a billion and a half people now. And even now cruelty continues…in a book entitled “China’s New Rulers,” the authors recently published some secret Communist Party documents that admitted to 60,000 Chinese killed by police while fleeing between 1998 and 2001…or 15,000 a year. 97% of the world’s executions take place in China, the book says. It is a historic change that China’s people are becoming less and less afraid of the government than it is of them. For example, 54 year old Mrs. Ma wanted her name published when she told about how she was tortured recently in Zhongxiang, near Shanghai, while her son was tortured in the next cell because the Party wanted her to disclose the names of the people in her church or renounce her Christian faith.

China is a big country. In the two months we have left for travel in China, we have chosen to see Yunnan Province in the southwest…the most varied of China’s provinces ranging from tropical rainforest to snow-capped Tibetan peaks. It is home to nearly a third of all China’s ethnic minorities and nearly 50% of all its people are non-Han Chinese.

Historically, Yunnan, in southern China, was always one of the first regions to break with the northern government in Beijing. During China’s countless political purges, fallen officials often found themselves exiled here, which added to the province’s rebellious character…and probably why it has been so attractive to the countless foreign backpackers who blazed the original trails through it.

I wanted to see China for myself…and now that I am here I feel that every individual Chinese I see is harboring a secret I will never know…

Animal Spotting The Big 5 In The Sarengeti

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I love the remnants of the Swahili cadence in Victor’s English.

Giraffe: “It is raining and he is very happy there-he is getting a shower.”

Bob watching elephants: “This makes you feel badly there are zoos.

Topi: lives up to 20 years, gestation 7 months, smell and sight are bad so they stand on termite mounds to see the lions-so no Topi in the crater because there are no termite mounds in the crater.

Bob: “My everlasting memory of Africa will be the Acacia Tree.”

Sarengeti means endless in Swahili…endless horizons, endless silence, endless pleasure for us.

Grand Gazelle: male has long horns and female has short ones; Lilac Breasted Brawler: Black Jackal-scavenger-only kills rats or grasshoppers; Impala has one mate-the male has to fight to get the female.

Best 4-wheeling ever! Hillary really missed a good time when she took the helicopter in!

The park’s vultures: White Headed Vulture; Hyena; Jackal

This is pleasure-we are finally out of the chaos of the city. Writing helps assimilate our experiences so we can move on…

Glossy Starling: Marshall Eagle; Dove; Bee Eater; Francis: I have to study and put it all in my mind. Guinnie Fowl; “Monkeys are not afraid of you they just like to be by their friends.” Velvet Monkey; Water Buck: males have horns, stay close to the water and need green grass. His enemy is the lion.

The Hippos are grazing all night and in the morning they come back and are sleeping in the day, Francis says. They are mating in the water, delivering babies in the water. They kill many people because they know man is not a good animal. They stay in the water 10 minutes without his breathing. Gestation is 8 months and life span is 40 years. Many Hippos together is called a school: Just like children-they must be together. Now is midnight for them. They roam 5 km at night and return to the pond in the morning. The Park has to arrange for keeping the ponds filled with water because otherwise we can get a problem and Hippos have to die when their skin dries out.

Then Bob says to Francis: “There are humans that eat 25kg a day, the gestation is 9 months they eat animals and leave a big mess.” Francis is delighted “very good, very good” he says. Bob and Francis are friends.

Black Smith; Embrella Acacia-big old one; Maasai Giraffe: gestation 15 months; lives 35 years. When they are walking or when they are ambling their legs are together and when they are running their legs are asymetrical. It is illegal to kill this animal, Francis says. Leopard: a loner-if you see two leopards together either they are mating or it is a mother with her cub. After the baby is born the male is takes off. They are afraid of the dew, like a housecat, so they stay in the tree. At night they are coming down and hunting for their food. When they are killing they put the food in the tree and they are there eating for three days. For hunting they have to use their cunning because they run so slow-they have to hide somewhere and wait-like the lion. Cheetah runs 110 km per hour and is fastest land animal. He cannot climb-just walks. Don’t know if we’ll see him today because of the tall grass…

Much sighing-becoming more and more relaxed…like the animals….

Many Ostriches; Francis says the best animal viewing is July-Sept when the grass is brown and everything is dry and animals are gathered around the water holes. However, Bob saw more animals this trip than he did six years ago in August.

Saw part of a pride of male lions out in a field. Francis spotted a lioness on a rock sleeping-she is waiting for the sun; completely relaxed with one foreleg wrapped down around her rock. There are only 3000 lions in the park. Lives 16-20 years; gestation 5 months. Sometimes their teeth break and they can’t eat food and they have to die. They eat 40 kg of meat-can go one week without eating; nocturanl-very active at night. Later we drive up to a vehicle and two lionesses are lying in the shade against the back wheel. Several vehicles arrive and park in a semi-circle around the lions so we can all take pictures.

We are triumphant! We have seen the “Big Five,” Buffalo, Elephant, Leopard, Lion, Rhino.

Sarangeti Spoof: a person says they have spotted an animal and everyone tries to see it. It is not funny.

We stop at a Maasai Village on the way out of the Sarangeti. “They are people-not monkeys,” I say, and refuse to get out of the car. Most everyone else goes inside the village, made of sticks and bushes, to watch the males do their jumping dance and make the Wilderbeast sound while the females try to sell their necklaces. It costs $5 to go into the village-this is not a cultural exchange or an I-Thou experience either one.

Egyptian Geese; The elephants kill and they pile branches on top and wait for three days to make sure he isn’t going anywhere; Toni Eagle; Wilderbeast: they are very stupid, Francis says, if one crosses the river they all have to cross…like sheep. If they have been in the hunting block, when you stop the car they are not sure of their life. They remember those bad people there. If they have always lived outside the hunting block you can go right up to them and they are not afraid of you.

Maasai Warrior Tribe

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Beautiful tall Masaii men and women still maintain their tribal lifestyle and religion-wearing red to keep the lions away from their cows. They live in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania. The cow is the practical and spiritual focus of their lives. The religion is animistic-they see God in everything.

The women build the houses, gather the firewood, cook and take care of the children. Every day the woman walks five miles for water and firewood.
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The man tends the cattle and keeps the lions away. The man eats alone and she hides while he is eating. The Maasai only eat meat, milk and drink hot blood-but they do not eat any wild game.

A boy is cirumsized at about age 16. If he cries out he cannot get married because it means he is not a man. Women used to be circumcised (clitorectomy) also but Francis says that has stopped in the Maasai tribe.

The man can have more than one wife. Some believe if the live in a house they will get sick so they live in the bush and make fire with sticks. They use no medicine or hospitals. If they die they just throw them in the bush, Francis says.

They make a beer called Hadsa out of honey. They sleep on the skin of an animal. They eat birds and baboons. The Chief wears the skin of a baboon,. Children go to school from age 7 through 7th grade by law in Tanzania. If they are not in school there is trouble, Francis says. The 122 tribes in Tanzania are allowed to intermarry and that is why we are not fighting each other, Francis says. Tribes are Christian, Muslim and Animist. They can marry Whites, Francis says.