Random Stuff we did before Kili

So some things are not in chronological order, oh well...

The second day we were in Arusha, we went to a Masai market with a friend we made (a local who sold us on showing us around and helping us set up a safari) Losai. We were as interesting to them as they were to us, they liked looking at our cameras and taking pics of us and were quite shy when we wanted to take pictures of them.

There is a bit of culture shock and also guilt for living the way we do and also proliferating "westernization" on the rest of the world. From what Losai was telling us, Masai people are more and more moving toward the new way of living where they try to set up businesses and leave the countryside to look for work in the city. With that people are "thinking about too many things" in the US we call it stress, and they are dieing about 20 years earlier than they used to, so much for increasing quality of life.

On the 7th we went to Losai's Doma, or village of his family and went to his house and had tea and lunch and were quite the attraction for the little kids in the Doma. He is the popular guy in town since he invested in a small solar panel for electricity for light at night and to charge his cell phone (yep cell phones everywhere with great service, cheap and reliable, they get signals all the way up Kili and chat the whole time :). So in some ways he is ahead of the curve with renewable energy but then he asked how people in the US make their homes, that is when the guilt set in. His home he built with his family and neighbors and it was made of cow dung, mud and straw, there was mosaic art in the walls and it had multiple rooms which is nicer than most and he was so welcoming.

Our journey out to his village was an experience, we had our first Dalla Dalla experience and they were able to cram 26 people into a little Nissan circa 1990's van.