Yosemite Maasai by Rachel L Mazur

Author:Rachel L Mazur
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
Publisher: Wild Bear Press
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Earlier that year, Kim had started dreaming about taking a trip to Tanzania to experience its wildebeest migration, music, and culture. As an environmental educator at the Yosemite Institute (YI) in California in the United States, she was eligible to apply for a Matthew A. Baxter III Memorial Award. In her application, Kim described wanting to learn about the country’s “rhythms of life” and to spend time volunteering to help build a house for a family, for which she’d spent time raising funds. She received the award.

Matthew Baxter was an enthusiastic, adventurous, compassionate man who fell to his death while climbing El Capitan at Yosemite National Park in 1996. At the time, Mathew had been working for YI, and the following year, YI created the Baxter Award to provide up to three YI (now called NatureBridge) employees each year with the finances and time to experiment with a personal challenge. Baxter recipients have traveled all around the world and helped with a myriad of causes.

That same year, Kim also received a Bishop Marcus Award, which honors the memories of Drs. Barry C. Bishop and Melvin G. Marcus, both YI environmental educators and members of its board. These two men valued environmental education, fun, adventure, and good will. Like the Baxter Award, this financial award encourages professional development of environmental educators by encouraging them to take on personal challenges. With the combined funds from these two awards, Kim planned a full ten-week experience.

As part of Kim’s trip to Tanzania, she participated in the Aang Serian Cultural Summer School Program, hosted by a company called Oreteti, which happened to be the company that employed Laizer. Kim and six other women from the U.S., Canada, and England would spend three weeks together throughout the program. During each of the three weeks, the group would learn about a different Tanzanian tribe through immersion and cultural instruction. The first week of the program was about Chaga culture. During that week, the group’s primary guide was from the Chaga tribe, but other Oreteti employees were around to help out as well. That week, Kim met Laizer and practiced Swahili a bit with him but otherwise didn’t spend much time with him. The second week, however, was about Maasai culture, and Laizer was the group’s guide.

For the Maasai week, the immersion experience included everything from learning about jewelry-making to watching their hosts puncture a bull’s neck and drink its blood. They entered an angan’g and got to see the inside of the enkajis, hear the Maasai women sing, and even watch the warriors slaughter a goat for orpul. By now, Laizer was used to the jokes from tourists, and when the expected quips about the Maasai culture came along, they didn’t bother him.

This time, however, he noticed that Kim didn’t laugh along with the others. Instead, she stood up for the Maasai and gently urged the others to consider their cultural bias. Laizer also noticed Kim was a little quieter than the others and more introspective. Laizer doesn’t know how or why it happened, but very quickly, he found he had fallen in love.

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