Monday Morning

Back in the United States, I feel confident (or at least hope) that you are all deep in a peaceful sleep. Here it is already Monday morning, and Arusha is a busy city on almost every day except Sunday, which is blistfully restful and calm, even if that means that most stores, restaurants and internet cafes are closed. I can never seem to stay asleep past 5am here - A cacophany of noise greets me in the morning; Dala Dala conducters yelling out the destination of their vehicle and attempting to get riders, the morning call to prayer (there seem to be a few different Mosques which all have various times beginning at 5am and ending around 5:30), large vehicles with bad mufflers and loud horns (part of road etiquette here is to honk to let any pedestrians - which there always are- know that you are driving down the road. It is then the pedestrian's responsibility to get out of the way). Over the next hour, I always try to eak out a few more minutes of sleep, but usually to no avail. The day has begun.

Later today, I will be leaving Arusha and heading 30km west to Mesarani. To be honest, I'm not exacty sure what I will be doing there. My friend's sister is a teacher who lives there, but she also does work with a center for Maasai development, so that is where I will be working, while living with her. Mesarani is located in the fairly geographically uninteresting part of northern Tanzania that separates the lush areas around Kilimanjaro and Meru (and their big cities, Moshi and Arusha) and the Ngorongoro Highlands and Serengeti National Park. Historically, it has been used by pastoralists over the past few hundred years. The creation of the national park system and conservation areas and the resulting expusion of many of of their resident pastoralist has created an environmental catastrophe in areas such as Mesarani, and the Maasai 'capital' of Monduli farther North. Because pastoralists are now confined to a much smaller area, and one that does not contail year-round water supplies, the land has been overgrazed resulting in intense desertification. Even now when it does rain, there is not enough plant life to allow the rain to permeate and nourish the soil, and as a result there are deep gullys criss-crossing the land that carry the run-off away during the rainy season. In addition, the past few years have seen much less rain than many people can remember (although the worst drought of recent memory was apparently in 1997). Even now, it is the beginning of April, and we have only seen a few short showers. While the rains are supposed to start gradually in February and get increasingly frequent over the month of March, and then last until May, since I arrived here last Wednesday, the only time it has rained was a short shower last night. While there was a cloud cover this morning, it is sunny and hot now.

The lack of rain and resulting lack of grazing is clearly problematic, and perhaps most so for the Maasai pastoralists whose wealth is measured in cattle rather than money in the bank. Like putting money in the stock market, a herd of cattle can tripple in just a few years. However, in a bad drought season, a Maasai can easily lose as much as a third of his herd to starvation, and even when he decides to sell an animal in order to get the money to buy food for his family, a thin sheep will only sell for $10, as opposed to the $30 he can get for a healthy sheep. With the land overused and rainfall diminishing, pastoralism is becoming an increasingly risky investment.

So today I head to Mesarani. We will see over the next few months whether this will be a bad year or not. So far their have been no rains, which is problematic to some, but not yet worrisome. But if the rains don't come by the end of the month, then we are in for trouble.