Some of the girls at Lake Eyasi come from the Datoga
tribe. We wanted to visit homes that the
students come from to provide viewers of the video a sense of the
transformation that occurs when the girls attend school at Lake Eyasi. So
several of us, accompanied by Lightness, paid a visit to a Datoga family. In
this group, the husband and father is 85; he has nine wives and close to 80
children and grandchildren. The man has a house for himself, and one of his
wives goes to stay with him in that house for two days at a time. Then the next
wife arrives.
The houses are rectangular in shape, with sloped, thatched
roofs. We spent time with some of the wives, who wore gorgeous skirts made out
of animal hide that had been heavily beaded.
The beading on the skirts, and the strings of beads hanging down from
the skirts, were spectacular! One of the wives showed us the necklaces she had
made to sell to tourists. Also hanging on display were small gourds decorated
with beads. And the women were making flour from corn on a grinding stone. They let a couple of us try to grind the
flour.
Lake Eyasi is a big onion-growing area, and the variety that
grows best here is red onions. The
Datoga family had a long shed to store onions, but it was empty when we were
there because the price for onions is high right now, so the onions have been
sold. When the price goes down again, onions will be stored in the shed.
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