Chagga and Masai families welcome visitors to their homes

Stinging, watering eyes – that was my initial impression upon entering two types of traditional homes in Tanzania. And temporary blindness until my eyes slowly adjusted to the dark and smokiness. But that’s what travelling in this African country is often like – adapting on the fly to the unfamiliar.

In 2009, I spent three weeks in Tanzania – two weeks climbing Kilimanjaro and another week visiting small towns and places around Mount Kilimanjaro National Park. In fall 2021, after sharing a PowerPoint presentation about my trip via Zoom with like-minded travel enthusiasts at Trinity United Church, I decided to adapt my slideshow to travel blog format in two parts. Read Part 1 – Climbing Kilimanjaro changes your viewpoint forever. I hope you enjoy the following photos and descriptions about visiting Chagga and Masai families (Part 2). 

I explored Moshi with others on a day tour around the town.

After arriving in the town of Moshi, I settled in to get over jet lag and then met up with a couple of other trekkers for a day tour around Moshi. We visited a batik shop, a graveyard with white markers of those who’d fought in the world wars, and a church. We went past many stalls selling fruits and vegetables, and through the main market building, Kiboriloni market, where just about everything was sold, including lots of grains, beans and seeds.

We also visited shops selling traditional Tanzanian fabrics, many of which are worn wrapped like skirts, called kangas. Some fabrics reflected the year – 2009. Michael Jackson had just died in June and Obama had taken office after being elected in 2008. Both were clearly famous in Tanzania.

As well as Moshi, I also visited the village of Marangu, Arusha National Park, and the village of Longido, further west and north.

Chagga families typically grow bananas, coffee, beans, root crops, maize and millet.

The day before my Kilimanjaro trek began, my trekking guide, Simon, took me for a tour around the village of Marungu. That’s one of the main starting points for trekkers doing a fast trip up Kili – often called the Coca Cola route. We saw the entrance to the National Park, with trekkers and porters getting ready. Then Simon took me to meet a Chagga family – an extended family – and see their typical farm and home. They grow bananas, coffee, beans, root crops, maize and millet.

The family compound had about four houses, plus sheds and pens for cows, chickens, sheep and goats. The patriarch (in green) invited me inside his traditional Chagga domed home – the equivalent of a pioneer log house or an Indigenous teepee in Canada. My eyes watered profusely and I couldn’t see anything in the smoky darkness, but after a few minutes I began to discern the features. The whole family would have slept on one side and the animals on the other. Clearly it was still being used for something, since the fire was burning.

Other homes in the compound were more modern. I met the rest of the extended family – lots of women and children. I had taken some small gifts to hand out – pencils and foam airplanes for the kids. I “talked” with my rudimentary Swahili and lots of hand gestures with the women, showing them a collage of photos of my home. They were very interested in that and passed the photo around with pointing and many smiles.

At the end of our visit, I paid the patriarch the equivalent of $5 Cdn. Since his annual income was likely about $60 Cdn, that represented a sizable payment for allowing tourists to visit his home. These so-called cultural visits were growing in popularity, as a way for local people to benefit directly from tourism.

Simon and the patriarch then took me to a small building where they make beer from millet – called Mbege (Mm-bay-ghee). And then I got to sample some – it wasn’t too bad! We passed around the same blue bucket and took turns drinking from it.

For lunch, Simon took me to a small restaurant and I had the traditional Chagga dish of macha lari – a stew made of beef and bananas. It didn’t taste too bad, but this version had some tough grisly stuff, even some arteries… I had much better versions later.

Sadly, many Tanzanian children are orphaned or their families cannot care for them.

The day after arriving back in Moshi from my Kilimanjaro trek, I visited the Amani Children’s Home, which takes in homeless children and educates them. I had brought some games from Canada to donate to them. They seemed to appreciate them and began playing right away.

I had a tour through the home and the yard outside, and spent some time just hanging out with some of the children. I let two boys play with my camera and one took the photo of me with two children. Mariam, the little girl in red, loved stroking my hair and kept draping it over her head, pretending it was hers. She’s also holding my journal, where she had traced around her hand on one of the pages.

The main highway from Moshi towards Arusha is busy with all manner of transportation means, from donkeys to transport trucks.

Then, I headed west for a one-day safari in Arusha National Park. Again, I was the only traveller, so received a personalized tour in a large jeep-like vehicle with an open top – great for taking photos.

The giraffes were my favourites, but we also saw many types of monkeys. The black and white is a colobus monkey; on the right is a blue monkey. The cute little baby baboon (centre) was a real troublemaker. He kept poking the others.

We saw a huge lake full of flamingoes, a tiny deer called a dik dik, Pumbaa the warthog, and hundreds of zebras.

Project Tembo was founded by two Ottawa women, one of whom is Jo Marchant, standing next to me.

After my safari, I travelled to Longido, a Masai village in northern Tanzania, where I stayed at the Project Tembo guest house. Tembo is a registered Canadian charity that provides funding and support to girls and women. (My church has supported Tembo for many years through the Trinity Jubilee Foundation.)

Everyone in the village knows co-founder Jo Marchant, calling her Mama Tembo. The children always gathered round, especially when the cameras came out. They adored seeing their faces on the screen. As we walked through the village, a little one shyly slipped a hand into mine.

Tembo means ‘elephant’ in Swahili, and it also stands for Tanzania Education and Micro-Business Opportunity. They give micro-loans to women to start businesses, sponsor girls to go to school (paying for uniforms and school supplies), run a summer English camp, and have a project to furnish homes with solar-powered lamps, which allow girls to do their homework after the sun goes down and their chores are finished. Girls are often married off at age 13, so it’s not just the financial barriers that prevent them from getting an education – there are even more cultural barriers.

Tembo also sponsors the jewelry market where women sell the jewelry they make, and they run jewelry-making workshops so women can learn what tourists are likely to buy. One woman is holding a green-and-blue-beaded stick – that’s a power club, which only men can own. I wanted to buy it to give to Bill, but she wouldn’t sell it to me. I had to convince her that I truly was going to give it to my husband, and then she reluctantly sold it to me.

Tembo has a library where students can come to study. A few years after I was there, my daughter Liz went to Longido for a month in the summer as a volunteer to help girls learn English at the English summer camp. Liz had gone to a high school for the arts (Canterbury High School in Ottawa) for the drama program, so she ran drama classes and helped in the library.

Dala dalas, a common form of inexpensive transportation, are notoriously overcrowded.

One day, we took a dala dala to go visit a boma – a Masai family compound – out in the countryside. Dala dalas are passenger vans that operate on routes like buses, and are always overpacked. Instead of carrying 10 or 12, they pack in twice that number and often have three or four men hanging off the sides. We had 26 people on that trip. Wild! The dala dala let us off at the side of the highway and we hiked about a kilometre to the boma.

We had brought gifts of food and school supplies for the children. The patriarch handed them out but fancied a Canadian pen on a lanyard that I had brought, and kept it for himself. The ladies brought out trays of tea in small metal cups. I took one and it had flies floating on the top. Jo leaned towards me and whispered, “Just drink it and take Immodium later.” It would have offended them if we hadn’t had the tea, so I drank part of it. And took Immodium.

Penina – the tall woman on the right – invited us inside her home. They’re made with cow dung and mud for walls and thatched with sticks for the roof. The entry way leads in and around like a snail shell. Inside was very dark and smoky, with accumulated soot hanging like little stalactites from the ceiling. My eyes took time to adjust again. Thin walls of sticks separated sleeping and storage areas.

I thought about the talk that Mary had given us (back in Longido, on another day) on female circumcision, aka female genital mutilation, which she is lobbying to end. It’s a gruesome practice, but attitudes are slowly changing.

Several women and lots of kids walked us back to the highway to catch a dala dala back to Longido. I spent only three days in Longido, but truly it felt like much much longer because I learned so much.

One of the many things I love about travelling is that chance to get completely unsettled, overwhelmed, by places and ways of living that are strange to me. It’s the start of seeing the world from a different point of view, understanding that not everyone believes or thinks the way we do in North America. Not everyone necessarily wants to trade places with us or think our way of doing things is better. It also confirms for me that people are much the same when it comes down to the basics: they love their families and want the best for them.

At the same time, we’re curious about how other people live. The Chagga mothers were fascinated by the photo I shared of my Canadian home, a collage showing it in summer and winter. They marvelled at the depth of the snow and, I’m sure, wondered how we could possibly live in such a place, much as I was wondering the same about their home.

I visited Tanzania in July 2009. Find out where we are right now by visiting our ‘Where’s Kathryn?’ page.