Word: loita
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Dates: during 1987-1987
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That night, while sleeping inside Moses' boma in the Loita Hills, the visitor dreamed that he raided cattle on West 57th Street in Manhattan. He loaded four stolen cows into a cattle trailer towed by an old Chrysler Imperial and drove them up across the Connecticut border...
...Masai are pastoralists who have always lived among the wild animals, lived amicably enough, with some violent exceptions that come with the territory. Moses lives in the remote Loita Hills in southwestern Kenya. On this day he wore his Nairobi clothes: two sweatshirts, one over the other, and dark trousers and sneakers. There were holes in his earlobes where ornaments might fit, but they were austerely empty. Handsome, thoughtful, impassive, answering questions like a visiting lecturer, Moses conjured up wild animals. His gaze was sleepy and distant...
...time to begin the six-hour drive from Nairobi to Moses' enk'ang (small village) in the Loita Hills. The Land Cruiser travels for three hours over paved road to the dusty frontier town of Narok, then follows a rutted washboard road across an empty and chokingly dusty plain until it shifts into four-wheel drive and begins the slow climb up into the hills. It is lovely in the hills. They look somewhat like the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico. Part of their beauty is their pristine remoteness. One rarely encounters a white man there...
...afternoon Moses and his guest came to the Morijo Loita Primary School, a windswept arrangement of tin-roofed buildings on a bare hillside a few miles from Moses' boma. Several dozen schoolchildren were gathered in a classroom of the sort that made one think of the places where Abraham Lincoln went to school on the Indiana frontier. The children sat in rows at long crude benches. They were asked about their encounters with the wild animals, in reality and in dreams. A boy named Seketo told of being chased by a lion once while he was herding cows...
...afternoon in the Loita Hills, there were three Masai warriors, called ilmurran, sitting in the shade beside a dung-walled hut. Their hair was long and greased with fat. They were barefoot and wore only the shuka, a bright- patterned piece of cloth, like a tablecloth, draped as a short toga around waist and shoulders. Their spears leaned against the wall of the hut, with their rungu -- knob-ended clubs that the Masai can throw with a fierce accuracy. One of the warriors, named David, spoke halting English. He was about 20 years old, although the Masai pay little attention...
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