Читать книгу Time is Cows: Timeless Wisdom of the Maasai - Tanya Pergola Ph.D. - Страница 9

We made a pact. I would help several Maasai communities address some of their most basic needs—poverty alleviation, clean water, modern education—and they would share with me the ways in which they healed their bodies, minds, and communities. The Maasai, like all indigenous communities I have spent time with, practice a giving and receiving cycle on a grand scale. They engage in simple, short-term exchanges when someone trades a big bull for two heifers, yet they also enter into long-term agreements when one person agrees to donate cattle for a family member’s wedding with the understanding that he will similarly be repaid years down the road. When you are part of a tight-knit community, this can be both a curse and a blessing, depending on how your own balance sheet adds up.

Fueled by my years learning about social and economic development, knowing what I knew about modern lifestyles in the West, and with new insights I had gained from Wangari, I was adamant about not simply responding to requests from the communities for boreholes, classrooms, and health clinics. I wanted to collaborate, to find a bridge between the good old ways and the good new ways.

If we were going to build classrooms, then we were going to provide computers with Internet access. If we were going to build health clinics, they were going to be based on integrated medicine. I found myself explaining that the West was not always best, while agreeing that some major improvements were necessary to help move people out of abject poverty.

In a Maasai community in Tanzania in 2001, we negotiated something along the following lines: the Maasai would teach me some of the secrets they had for maintaining emotional and spiritual wellbeing, and share with me the plant medicines they used for healing. In exchange, I would help them become more modern by building schools, cultivating medicinal plant nurseries, and connecting them to the world through information technology. I knew I had the experience, expertise and contacts, and that I could harness these resources to bring real change into the Maasai world. And I was passionate to learn what they had to teach me. It would be an extraordinary exchange—and it would transform my life.

One of Terrawatu’s first computer labs at a school in Tanzania, 2005

Sululu and I giving a plant to a women’s network leader for their tree nursery in Mkonoo Village, Tanzania