Four Masai children no more than ten years old carried small whips alone on the side of the road. I didn’t see them for long, as my car rushed by, but their job was presumably to care for what must have been a hundred goats, and at this instance usher them across the highway in unison. Knowing as little as I do about the pastoral Masai culture, I know that these animals are life as much as water, and you do not have to look far to connect and compare white children of the West who cannot even pour cereal at that age without making a mess. It is a fact of life that children grow up quicker in the third world, as a matter of necessity as much as it is culture. The more these sort of images accumulate the more you redefine what it means when someone says someone else has grown up sheltered.
Up the road, past domesticated goats and wild baboons, sits
the Serena Hotel at Lake Manyara – part of one of the most successful hotel
groups in East Africa, having perfected the art of getaways in complete isolation.
For days I stayed there around Easter, watching the rains come out of the
nearby mountains and spread across the lake in varying waves and shades and
layers. This is the green expanse of the Kilimanjaro Region, where rolling hills
and flat grassland exist as one, and water is everywhere during the rainy
season and carves its little niches in streams and puddles and misty downpours.
It all created a delightful sort of stillness, one absent over the past few
months of my life, where you sit and close your eyes and there is no urgency
and you just listen to the birds and the bugs make their noises. I believe that
in this space you find everything – the words that fit on a page and the rights
and lefts your life requires next – and I do trust it’s there waiting even when
it feels far away.
“…and then they were
out and Compie turned his head and grinned and pointed and there, ahead, all he
could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the
sun, was the top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was
going.”
Easter is always a peculiar time, whether in the solemn streets of Seville during Semana Santa, the old cobblestone pathways of colonial Guatemala, or an isolated lodge of a heavily Christianized African nation. I hold every age of human history to the same explicable standards. As I have trouble believing a man could rise from the dead in today's world of zombie pop culture, I do not find this plausible 2,000 years ago at a time the most respected cure for common ailments was bleeding a patient to balance their four humors. But people continue bellowing "He is risen," believing its importance, its tangible benefit, and how much private attention is given to our lives while billions continue to suffer based on chance and geography. I've always found organised religion to the most convenient thing in the world, because you don't have to do a damn thing, yet you believe you've done everything.
Down the cliff, falling away from the Serena at the base of the Lake,
sits a Masai Village. There the goats sleep alongside the people and the people
live in grass huts you only find nowadays in museums that say “this is how they used
to live.” Hippos live in the Lake and elephants in the surrounding plains and the herders have to think about protecting their livestock from lions, and this is one of their challenges. Thanks to Christian Colleges and missionary expeditions, these villages celebrate Easter too, and whether that makes their lives better or worse or the same, I'm not the one to say. In Africa, as is true anywhere in the world, the elegance and the harshness sit side by side, but perhaps Africa just can't mask its paradoxes as good as the others just yet.
I didn't see Kilimanjaro until the last day; the low lying clouds and the periodic rains kept the tallest mountain in Africa hidden from view. The snow-capped peak was only visible for a time out my right-side window, ascending and descending quickly back into Nairobi - back to suits and ties, impossible schedules and deadlines, phone calls and emails and meetings, and all the various tenets that make life so busy again. The paradoxes, for better or for worse, function in a way that sometimes make a small cabin with a wood stove in the middle of the Canadian Rockies with a pen and a beer alone the only thing in the world that makes sense.
I didn't see Kilimanjaro until the last day; the low lying clouds and the periodic rains kept the tallest mountain in Africa hidden from view. The snow-capped peak was only visible for a time out my right-side window, ascending and descending quickly back into Nairobi - back to suits and ties, impossible schedules and deadlines, phone calls and emails and meetings, and all the various tenets that make life so busy again. The paradoxes, for better or for worse, function in a way that sometimes make a small cabin with a wood stove in the middle of the Canadian Rockies with a pen and a beer alone the only thing in the world that makes sense.
