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Dancers in the Darkness from the Orphanage

FOLLOWING a relaxing afternoon at the ecolodge, the sky quickly darkened and it grew cold as the evening drew. The sun had long set when we arrived for dinner. As usual we started with a small bread bun. Then we had yet another really nice soup. This time it was a brown vegetable soup that was really delicious. I mentioned that I liked to photographically document the meals so I could later write it up if relevant. I mentioned that I had a hard time remembering a lot of the meals I had eaten in my earlier trips through South East Asia. That had been a real shame because the food was always fantastic there.

Travis took my credit card camera and photographed me in between a couple of sauce bottles. I gave my big camera to a guy I had met this afternoon to photograph our group. Then the main meal came out. It was a couple of chicken steaks, some vegetable casserole and rice. Then we had pancakes for dessert.

We discussed our cultures. Jeremiah revealed he was a Masai Warrior from Kenya. I had wondered where he was from. He told us that for a Masai Warrior boy to become a man, he has to kill a lion. Jeremiah did that some years ago, so he definitely was a man. He had done it using only a small spear – as the Masai do. There was no technology involved, just some cunning and brute force. It was hard for us to believe that this really nice man had killed such a beautiful creature.

He then told us about his two wives at home. In Masai tradition, he was polygamous. It was hard to imagine what life would be like for the wives, living in the same village, and he being away for up to a month at a time working running tours around East Africa. They would get very lonely.

Then he told us that he was looking for a third wife. This time he wanted a Westerner, probably an Australian. Now the cultural differences really were coming out. I told him that I couldn’t possibly imagine any Westerner wanting to marry someone who already had two wives. It was totally against our culture. It was hard enough with today’s standards for a woman to accept exclusive rights to a man in our culture, and impossible to accept someone who was already committed. Travis just didn’t understand the cultural differences, but he was still keen to find a Western woman.

Travis our driver had been sitting there very quietly. He had obviously adapted to the Western influences a lot better than Travis. He mentioned he had one wife and now a baby. He won’t marry anyone else. He had never killed a lion before but he still considered himself a man.

We were very full from dinner. Emma came and announced there was a cultural show put on by the local orphanage. It was a free concert, so I thought cool.

We walked out of the dining hall and there were numerous seats set up around a campfire all facing towards some trees in the thick darkness. The camp fire consisted of a few large planks about two metres long crossed over with the middle burning. It was quite a large fire and I wondered if it would get out of control. We sat in the seats – they were the uncomfortable ones that had been brought down from upstairs.

The group arrived. There were eighteen people of different heights, mostly teenaged. It was very dark with the only light being from the dim smoky campfire. They performed some amazing group dances that they had obviously put a lot of practice into. The dances told stories which I didn’t understand much as it was very dark. Before each dance though they told a brief story about what the dance was about. They were leaping about all over the place and had the dances well-coordinated.

At the end of the show they passed around a small basket for donations, and then we all turned in for the night. It was very dark in the tent. Once I put my light out I could see faint flashes of lightning. Then later I could hear the thunder echoing through the valley. A big storm struck but thankfully it was mostly rain. There weren’t too many lightning strikes too close, and there wasn’t much rain. I then realised that the ground will be very boggy tomorrow. What if it was going to rain tomorrow? Will that mean we won’t be able to go out gorilla trekking?

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