Happiness can be contagious

There is no use for my alarm clock here because countless large colorful birds never fail to make me fully alert at 5:50 am. The first thing we do every morning is track all the animals that came near to the spring the previous night. Just a half hour before we got there this morning a mama giraffe and her baby had come down to get a drink and then drifted back into the endless dusty red hills. We have found dung of every kind and can hardly keep up with the types of birds that fly by. Meanwhile, Mt. Kilimanjaro slowly lights up and looks more magnificent than ever through the clear, brisk air. After breakfast we usually start our daily classes. The Kenyan professors don’t treat us like tourists – they look at us as researchers with fresh ideas to help preserve this incredible place. A five-year research plan has been implemented by the professors, which includes aspects of wildlife policy, management, and ecology. We take intensive Kiswahili classes everyday so that we will eventually be able to have conversations with everyone in order to conduct research.
This afternoon we drove in our incredibly tough, worn-out, land rovers on dusty roads to a Maasai Boma (a village). Surrounding the Boma is a fence made of thorny shrubs to keep their cows in, and the lions out. Inside there are small huts made of cow dung and wood. A Maasai house is smaller than a small bedroom in the U.S. and sleeps up to 8 people. Amazingly enough there are still several bedrooms within this small area. Husbands and wives have different rooms and the kitchen (which consists of a small fire pit) is in the woman’s room. A Maasai Boma makes you feel as though everything you thought you ever needed in life is ridiculous and just makes things complicated. When we first got there the women sang us two beautiful songs while dancing. In return we took out an I-pod speaker and danced the Macarena. They were thrilled and started dancing with us immediately.
Happiness is contagious in Africa. Everyone has so little, but is so happy. Even when you want to feel sad or tired all you have to do is look at an African’s smile and your heart is lifted.