A Journey to Maasailand
A Journey to Maasailand
by Amanda A.
St. Mark’s Anglican Church in the parish of Oloilalei in Kajiado County stands in a wide expanse of brown and crackling grass which, in fairness, is probably green and quite lush in the rainy season. It appears to rise from nothing – nearly alone as far as the eye can see, with the exception of a few small out-buildings and a long, low primary school a hundred meters away. No one is in sight as our taxi follows the white pick-up truck through the church gate.
We climb out of the car into the cool breeze and glorious earthiness of Maasailand, my long skirt flap, flap, flapping against my legs. Our host is called Josiah, and we are walking on his ancestral lands.
Josiah is Maasai. He is also a seasoned Pioneers missionary, an experienced Bible translator, and a board member for Pioneers East Africa. I had met Maasai people before – many years ago in a beachside resort. They were wrapped in their blue and red tartan shukas, draped with typical Maasai beading, and probably somewhat weary of dancing and singing like caricatures of themselves for foreigners on holiday who rarely consider the universe of meaning within each individual dancer’s life.
My abiding memory of the Maasai from that seaside performance was the jumping. Alongside the shukas and beads, the Maasai are known for the Adumu dance – the jumping dance. The Maasai usually dance the Adumu in a circle as part of their rite of passage into adulthood. To see it in person is both humbling and thrilling – a demonstration of the marvel of the human body, and yet so ‘other,’ so ‘beyond,’ to a five-foot-two girl from Alabama.
Now in his seventies, Josiah’s Adumu days are mostly behind him. Like his cousins and brothers, Josiah was trained as a Maasai warrior (‘Did you have to kill a lion for your initiation?’ we asked him. ‘No, no,’ he laughed, ‘we only killed lions for sport.’). As a child, Josiah was the most mischievous of his twenty-two siblings, so when the government came knocking, requiring one child from each family to be sent away to school, Josiah’s father was all too happy to comply. The mischievous child developed into a precocious student, and eventually became a teacher. In the course of his teaching, at a time when there were very few Maasai Christians, a book by Billy Graham introduced Josiah to Jesus, and everything changed.
We never really left
A lifetime later, Josiah and his wife Sarah – the daughter of one of the very first Maasai pastors – have returned to live on his ancestral lands full time. ‘We never really left,’ he explained to me. Though much of their working life and their ministry of evangelism, literacy, and Bible translation was spent in Nairobi, Josiah, Sarah and their children would spend roughly two weekends a month among their family on the ancestral lands. They built a primary school to provide education for their 100-plus nieces and nephews, and they have recently pioneered a scheme to ensure that the ancestral lands will be divided among the extended family fairly. Josiah pointed out the small boundary markers as we crunched our way across the grass just outside the churchyard.
The church building is less than five years old and can seat nearly 300 people. That number boggled the mind, especially considering the fact that the 10km rough dirt road we’d travelled from the main road wound its way through what appeared to be deserted scrubland. The only sign of life had been a startled zebra dashing off the road and a rock hyrax watching bemusedly as our taxi struggled up a steep slope on the boulder strewn track. I couldn’t understand why Josiah would build such a large church building in such an empty-looking place. But all was not as it appeared. ‘This church is new, but we need to knock out the back wall,’ he joked. ‘There are too many people. We can’t fit them, and people are standing outside.’
Though the building is still quite new, the church itself is decades old. To the left of the church building stands a massive, aged, multi-trunked acacia tree. ‘This was the original church,’ Josiah explained. The tree is three hundred years old, and for centuries, it was the epicentre of spiritual activity in the area. Josiah’s ancestors came to this tree to make sacrifices to the gods – asking for protection or rain, amongst other things – and over time it became a gathering place for the community.
Over their years in Nairobi, as Josiah and Sarah continued to return to the village – bringing education, community health training, and the gospel with them – the tree became a church. Five believing women, with their children, began meeting in its shade on Sundays to fellowship and worship the Lord together. Twenty years (and much prayer) later, their husbands and 300 other people walk up to 3 kilometres to join together for worship each Sunday.
The Shepherd's staff
To the Maasai, land and livestock are everything, so it wasn’t surprising that a herd of sheep and goats was roaming Josiah’s home compound when we arrived. (‘The cheetah took one of our goats last night,’ he shared.) But even so, Josiah and Sarah aren’t typical Maasai. The mental image I had cultivated of Josiah before we met - a wiry, barefoot old man in a shuka, bent with age over his gnarled staff - could not have been further from reality. He had greeted us with the energy and vigour of a man half his age, dressed in a polo shirt, black jeans, and a baseball cap, and driving a pick-up truck.
Sarah welcomed us to their compound’s three-room guest house, where she had spread a beautiful lunch of rice, cabbage, and delicious goat stew. She, too, defied my limited expectations. Sarah hadn’t grown up in a village, but in a town. She was well-educated and had spent her working life as a science teacher. Together, they simply didn’t look Maasai. I came to discover that even the herd of sheep and goats was a deliberate ministry choice. Sarah explained:
‘For a long time, the Maasai resisted the gospel because of how it was presented [by the first missionaries]. The Maasai are really conservative and very proud of their ways. They had a very difficult time taking in the faith, because they felt like it meant them stopping being who they were. But we come from here. We're Maasai, so we understand their ways, we understand the way they think - and that has given us an ‘in’ with them, because we are able to communicate in their own language. Because God gave us that opportunity, we have been able to do so much more than people from other communities would have done among the Maasai in such a short time.
'The Maasai are very interesting people, because they will read you, they will check you out. They will check your life, the way you talk, the way you do things, and then they will determine whether you are worth listening to. Then they begin to listen to you, and if the content of what you are saying is something that can improve their lives, then they begin to take it in. As you were coming, you saw the sheep outside. Josiah said, “You know, if you don't have sheep here, really, you can't speak to anyone.”
'And it is true - you cannot come to speak about a gospel that brings life, that changes people, that improves them if you have no goats, if you have no cows - there don't have to be many, but some - because for the Maasai, that is their livelihood. Then, a wise person will bring the shepherd side of Jesus Christ into the gospel, and they're like, “Oh, okay, so He appreciates our lifestyle, He appreciates who we are.” And slowly, people have come to the Lord that way.’
After finishing our lunch, we moved outside for a cup of tea under the trees. ‘If you were staying for a longer time, we would take you for a walk. We love walking here,’ Sarah said. I asked about the cheetah and other wild animals. Wasn’t it dangerous to walk outside the compound? ‘There has never been an attack here,' she said. ‘We know this place. The animals won’t bother us unless we startle them.’
Two worlds
The land around was broad and brown. Scrubby trees stretched down a shallow slope and into the distance where the next hill rose. House cats of all sizes and temperaments roamed the compound. The tea was sweet. My long skirt continued its flapping in the soft November breeze. We were in the middle of what seemed like nowhere – to this day I haven’t been able to find it on a map - and yet…and yet, it felt so much like home. So much so, in fact, that my husband and I seriously considered cancelling our weekend safari and coming back to the village instead.
The place had a peace, a rightness, about it that can only be described as ‘holy’. Perhaps it is a ‘thin place’, made so by decades of faithful gospel witness. Perhaps it is the residue of long years of prayer, hanging in the air when words have momentarily stilled. Whatever it is, God is moving there – in the crackling grass and the tinkle of the goat’s bell, in the creak of a 300-year-old acacia tree that has never known better days than these, and in the laughter of two Maasai missionaries who daily and deftly walk the space between two worlds.
A week later, I crossed paths again with Sarah and Josiah. We were at a Pioneers conference near Nairobi, and Sarah came to Sunday worship wearing a stunning traditional Maasai dress, complete with a floor-length cape. She took my breath away.
Josiah and Sarah concluded the service by teaching us a song they sing at their church with the ancient tree and the crackling grass. The words I have forgotten, but the beat stays with me. The service concluded and I, with the other non-Africans, filed out into the sunshine. But the band kept playing that song and the drummers kept drumming. While the rest of us made for the tea and cakes, inside a circle formed, musicians and singers, all dancing – knees high, arms waving.
Tea in hand, I found the beat magnetic. I was drawn back inside. There, in the circle, was Josiah with Sarah in her flowing Maasai cape. Lost in worship. Jumping.