After a long hot day in the bush last week, we arrived at a boma in the late afternoon. The previous day it had rained and the flies were out in force so we set up our camp some distance from the boma.......
As we cooked our supper of beans and rice the moon rose behind the hill under which the boma was built. The light slowly changed from the dying amber of the sun’s last rays to the ghostly white grey of a full moonlit night. A cow and a sheep had died that day and the fires, lit for roasting the meat, could be seen from miles around. Dark shadowy figures started coming across the valley as men from all the neighbouring bomas headed for the meat feast, beyond the hill behind us. I heard the howl of a hyena. It was quite close and I walked up to the brow of the hill to see if I could guess where it was. It called again moving down the valley below me towards the meat feast and then again right next to the boma. A young lad saw it run off but it was too dark for me to make it out. I heard another starting to howl way up in the hills and asked him if there were many hyenas in the area. “Many, many and they come to play outside the boma over there on the other side” he replied, pointing to the hillside opposite us.
The sky was clear with a light breeze. Thankfully the lack of rain meant there were no mosquitos and the flies had disappeared for the night. As we sat round the fire, Nosikito, our Maasai friend who we were traveling with, told us about a dream she had had the night before we invited her to join us for the safari. In her dream there was a very old person sitting on a skin and she, Lisa and I were gathered around the person. The person wasn’t dead but it was as if we were preparing them for death. She didn’t know where the person was or whether it was a man or a woman.
That afternoon we had visited an elderly Maasai ‘koko’ (grandmother) and when I had asked her if she was afraid to die, God had said to Nosikito ‘This is the person in the dream.’ I realised then why she had been so earnest in talking to the koko about death, about forgiving her errant son who she had held a grudge against for many years, about finding peace and being ready to meet God. Nosikito knew she was preparing her for death.
The Maasai fear death more than anything else and she seemed to have great liberty to talk about it with the koko in front of most of the members of her boma. I wondered if this was what the whole safari had really been about as our plan to help people with food etc had not proved necessary. I was just so thankful that Nosikito had come along as she has such an open heart for her people and we had both been deeply moved when praying for the old lady. She must have had this dream in mind when she had accepted our invitation to travel with us never having been to this area before and not knowing what lay ahead.
Apparently several of the women in the boma had been angry saying, “Why have you come to pray that our grandmother will die?” Nosikito had assured them that we hadn’t, that death was under God’s control not ours, and only He knew when she would die. This had pacified them somewhat but they were nervous of the subject being discussed so openly. The old koko didn’t mind at all though, and had sat listening intently although not seeing, as she is now quite blind. She had prayed for each of us in turn, taking a hand in both of hers and spitting on it between phrases as she blessed us. We had then rubbed our hands on our chests to show that we had taken it to heart.
We ate our beans and rice staring into the fire and thought about the day, the dream and being in the middle of the bush under a full moon with God being there so intimately involved in people’s lives.
I smiled as I remembered that when we got up to go the old koko had asked me if I could bring her some coffee next time. We had taken her tea and sugar but she found that coffee settled her stomach better!
