M is for Maasi

A morning journey on the dalla dalla is enlivened by the presence of a beautiful and somewhat exotic maasi man. There are a number of maasi men in Dar, most of who seem to work as security guards. According to a newspaper article, the maasi come to Dar to make their fortune and, potentially, meet a white woman. After all, white women “perceive [maasi warriors] to be erotic that is why women pensioners from Europe come to look at them”. My dalla dalla maasi had a chequered, rich red fabric draped around his body and a white bead sheath encircling each calf. His hair was shaved into a triangle with the point contacting to the crown of his head where it met finely rolled skeins of hair that draped down his back. I spent the entire dalla dalla trip taking side long glances at the maasi, drinking in his attire. I felt like one of the little kids that peep at me through their eyelashes as I walk down the street. My knowledge about the maasi could fit into a thimble. What I do know is that the maasi come from northern Tanzania, almost a 100% of their women undergo female genital mutilation (like or not), and the Swahili plural for maasi is wamaasi.

I learnt the plural of maasi during my first Swahili lesson. I decided that the ad hoc process of learning Swahili from my colleagues was not cutting it so I’ve started taking Swahili lessons twice a week. My teacher is an incredibly petite and vivacious woman who delights in testing our Swahili vocab, which is non-existent. We have been told numerous times that Swahili is an easy language to learn and, relatively speaking, it is easy. There are few irregular verbs, words don’t have genders and sentence construction is straight forward. However, Swahili has few, if any, commonalities with either the Romance or Germanic languages. I think learning Swahili is going to be a feat of memorization, which will no doubt be helped by our almost total immersion. I’m looking forward to surprising my co-workers with a well-placed Swahili phrase or even a whole sentence.

This week, a virus ate the 90 page document I was working on, leaving nothing more than a trail of Ys in its wake. I almost cried. The efforts of the IT guy and my implementation of various web-based solutions resulted in the recovery of about 55 pages of the document, much to my relief. In the circumstances, it was a good result. I was later told that the server, upon which all the documents are stored, often gets viruses. I was advised to keep a back up copy of any documents I was working on either on my desktop or on a USB key. This piece of advice felt a little like closing the barn door after the horse had escaped.