On the last day of our safari tour, we met the chief of Oyarata, a Maasai village, and he welcomed us into his home.
Thirty-five-year-old Samuel Ngotiek was dressed in a red tartan cloak. We each gave him $20 to enter his village as an admission ticket. Village men and boys greeted us by chanting, dancing and jumping up and down, as is the custom to demonstrate strength, around the center of the village. A row of women sang and clapped for us, and the villagers showed us how to vigorously rub a stick into a special piece of wood and capture the sparks that you could blow and coax into fire. Samuel invited us inside one of the brown huts made partly from cow dung and showed us where families slept and where they kept the calf. There was no electricity, so we used the light from our cell phones to see.
One of the biggest current challenges for Oyarata village is how to improve the level of education for the children with limited resources. The village collects about $135,000 each year from tourists and puts it towards teachers’ salaries, stationery and exam fees for the school of about 300 students and teachers, Samuel said. Most of the kids stay in school until the eighth grade and then drop out at around age 12. Many of the boys become cow herders. Samuel has been thinking of ways to raise more money for the school, such as training villagers with new skills such as carving and weaving, he says.
“My plan mostly is to guide and to educate the importance of education, which is the key to success, and thus make sure the number of dropouts reduces,” Samuel wrote in a text.
