Land of the Datooga

So last week Arne and I went on a home stay to Reagan’s house. But for 3 nights and two days we went to visit some other friends. They are a family working with the Datooga (one of the 100 or so tribes in TZ). They are on the south side of Lake Eyasi (just south of the Ngorongolo crater). The environment was fairly green as it is wet season but for 9 months of the year it’s dessert like.

We were able to visit some of the Datooga homes where I helped shepherd some goats with my fimbo (stick) that every Datooga man carries. We also helped stretch out a skin of a cow (covered with cow excretion) cutting little slits and then hammering with a rock little stakes to stretch it out, it wasn’t a clean job but it was something I’d never done and I enjoyed that. The women when they are married are presented with a leather skirt, which shows that they are married. They don’t take it off for years apparently they have a pungent smell especially when in a enclosed space with someone wearing one for instance a car. When we went into a house I was given a challenge by our host to find 10 non organic items apart from their clothes and jewellery, I saw a cooking pot, plastic bags, plastic cups, packets of animal medicine, and one or two other things but that was it, and not 10. By non organic I mean things that they hadn’t made themselves or sourced naturally like the grinding stones or the wooden stools.

One of the homes we visited was one of the richest guys around, he has hundreds of cows and hundreds of goats. He is also a witch doctor, we didn’t meet him, but going into his home we saw and were told about the pointed sticks in the house under the roof pointing out the door. The number sticks represents how powerful a witch doctor you are 1 being low and the highest being around 6 and this guy had 6. You could see that one stick was pretty recent as it wasn’t too black from the soot (cooking). In his thorn enclosure there were 5 houses one for each of his wives.

We went to the school in the village although you couldn’t tell it was a village because the centre consists of about 3 buildings: a café, house and a stable or roofed enclosure. To say you’d blink and miss would be a severe understatement. The houses are in thorn enclosures over 500m apart so it’s not what you’d picture when you think of a village. In the school Arne and I taught them the “God is so good” song in Swahili and spoke to them a little and a story resembling the Gospel.

It really gave some meaning to the saying ‘in the sticks’ the separating of the sheep from the goats and a picture like that of the Old Testament.