My Maasai Life. Robin Wiszowaty
trek we make every Saturday to buy the week’s groceries and supplies. On foot, the trip takes four hours along the dusty, arid spine of the hills’ grasslands, then three more back down through the acacia-filled valley. But as one of the earliest passengers on the road this morning, I am lucky enough to stake out a seat on our community pickup truck. As usual, we squish as many people as possible into the truck’s bed, pressed in until no standing room is left, even with many balanced on one foot.
I’m seated in the only available spot in the truck’s bed, above the wheel well. Milk containers roped to an iron bar above thump against my skull with every bump in the road. An old man with long, stretched earlobes crams against me to my right, his wrinkled face and weathered feet telling of his many years of toil in the unyielding sun. To my left, a group of women laugh and talk animatedly in words I understand only occasionally.
The pickup jerks back and forth, bumping down the craggy road, kicking up a breeze of gritty dust. The combined reek of burning oil and close bodies, along with the ailing roar of the truck’s engine, overwhelms me. With I am squeezed with dozens of other bodies into the back of a rusted, white Toyota pickup truck, bouncing along a dirt road toward the market town of Soko. A long hour’s drive over the eastern slopes of lush and towering hills, it is a trek we make every Saturday to buy the week’s groceries and supplies. On foot, the trip takes four hours along the dusty, arid spine of the hills’ grasslands, then three more back down through the acacia-filled valley. But as one of the earliest passengers on the road this morning, I am lucky enough to stake out a seat on our community pickup truck. As usual, we squish as many people as possible into the truck’s bed, pressed in until no standing room is left, even with many balanced on one foot.
I’m seated in the only available spot in the truck’s bed, above the wheel well. Milk containers roped to an iron bar above thump against my skull with every bump in the road. An old man with long, stretched earlobes crams against me to my right, his wrinkled face and weathered feet telling of his many years of toil in the unyielding sun. To my left, a group of women laugh and talk animatedly in words I understand only occasionally.
The pickup jerks back and forth, bumping down the craggy road, kicking up a breeze of gritty dust. The combined reek of burning oil and close bodies, along with the ailing roar of the truck’s engine, overwhelms me. With one hand I reach to steady a small boy as he takes a seat on my lap; with the other, I swat away a chicken pecking at my foot. As the boy burrows further into my arms, I squint into the sun and wind, watching the women’s scarves blow freely in the breeze, waving in bursts of vivid ochre and blue.
I gaze out beyond this scene, at the valley stretching to a hazy horizon, and I ask myself: how did I, an ordinary American girl who grew up arguing with her parents, swimming for her high school team and playing kickball in suburban backyards, end up here?
My story began just a few years ago, but it seems a lifetime away.
1
My Ordinary Life
I grew up in the eighties in the safe and ordinary world of Schaumburg, Illinois, a large suburb forty kilometres northwest of Chicago. Schaumburg was proud of its reputation as the home of the sprawling Woodfield Mall—“America’s Third Largest”—the state’s number one tourist attraction and the anchor of the community’s economy. Schaumburg mainly white middle-class residents raised their families in quintessential American neighbourhoods, the kind where kids gathered on lawns for endless games of kickball and shooting hoops while parents watched from lawn chairs, or traded gossip over potluck dinners. In our neighbourhood, every summer the entire community would rally around a gigantic block party, with games, food and an annual talent show; when I was nine, I proudly shouldered the responsibility for finding raffle prize sponsorships and then wowed the crowd with a hula dance to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Kokomo.”
I am the middle child in my suburban family. My older sister, Erin, and my younger brother, Adam, felt sometimes close, sometimes far away when we would battle through the shifting, always-complex power dynamic among us. As the eldest, Erin felt a responsibility to look out for Adam, even while I picked on him incessantly. His natural kindness made him vulnerable to my sneaky tactics, and I often managed to get him to take the fall for my own mischief. With Erin, I liked to maliciously flaunt my beloved Orange Tic Tacs and sour green apple Laffy Taffys and work up her jealousy—early on she had been diagnosed with juvenile onset diabetes and had to avoid sugar. Though our parents strove to treat each child equally, I felt I would never be as sociable and focused as Erin or as kind and creative as Adam. Despite our conflicts, in the end we bonded over our common appreciations: oldies radio, Pac-Man, lavishing endless affection on our dog Fluffy—the typical stuff of American teens.
At ten years old, my personal world-view was just starting to take shape.
Yet from an early age, I was unsatisfied with my ordinary life. I just knew there had to be something more exciting and significant than this transparent world. I could never find my niche or any comfortable sense of self. Looking around, all I saw were people doing only just enough to get through their lives. Household conversations focused on whether to buy Frosted Flakes or Cap’n Crunch, who won Monday Night Football, upcoming sales at clothing stores. My friends occupied their time either working toward promising futures—college, careers, marriage—or immersed in the escapism of fashion, rumours and Holly wood.
But wasn’t there more to life than this? Why did this simple, day-to-day life seem to satisfy most people, but not me? I couldn’t explain what I wanted instead or what kind of person I really wanted to become. I just knew it wasn’t what I already had.
An inner anger that I could barely understand, let alone express, gradually began to build inside me. A fire of dissatisfaction burned within, a fire that lashed out in anger, against my parents, against my brother and sister. It was a fire that would only build and build, until I did something to quiet it. I could not be contained by high school’s narrow hallways, my suburban streets, my ordinary life.
Was I the only one who felt this way? Questioning things aloud and refusing to conform within my social circle would only find me maligned as a “rebel,” so I buried myself in constant activity, fighting to always push harder to wring experience from every moment. Starting in seventh grade, I became enamoured with singing in the choir and performing in musical theatre, and I joined every team or club I could. Tennis lessons. Drama class. Student congress. Swim team. Track and field. Softball. Model un. A summer job lifeguarding at Schaumburg Park District. I filled every spare moment between practices or competitions by keeping a hectic social calendar with friends and my boyfriend—movies, restaurants, baking.
For most people, it seemed better to take the easy way every time.
And for the time being, so did I, grinning and bearing it, going with the flow, even as my anger simmered.
But at the time I felt alone and I directed my dissatisfaction and anger at those most accessible: my family.
My father Tony comes from a Polish Catholic background. His grandparents, my great-grandparents, met onboard an ocean liner while crossing the Atlantic, arriving at New York’s Ellis Island port in 1906 and marrying shortly thereafter. They spoke next to no English and had little money and, as the Great Depression loomed, they had to take any odd jobs they could find to support a burgeoning family of seven children. A middle child amid this brood, my grandfather eventually moved to the Midwest, founded a printing business that would support the family he raised there, but only with hard work, long hours and thrifty spending. My grandfather also believed passionately in the value of education and took pride in the fact that his daughters would be the first women in his family line to attend university.
But my dad, his only son, faced a number of challenges. At school a teacher told his parents that he was slow and that his parents should lower any expectations they had for his success. In fact, this teacher’s prediction of failure did exactly the opposite, only motivating my father to work harder and dream bigger.
After