Maasai Culture; Tenacity

As I've studied the Maasai culture around us, observed the community groups, the leaders, our neighbors, our colleagues, specific cultural strengths rise to the foreground of the mural. The first is tenacity.

Tenacity. Here is a group of people living as pastoralists, wearing their traditional clothes, prizing their cattle, living in mud, dung, ash and stick huts without running water or electricity, holding on to their traditions and identity with a vengeance when societies around the world have not lived in this manner for centuries.   A Maasai would pick a mud hut over a metal sheet house if they were caught in the rain and had to stop by a neighbor's to dry out and get warm.

People can walk for hours to come to meetings.
I think this is what the feet looked like that Jesus knelt to wash.

A story about tenacity. We were helplessly wandering around the open Savannah in our bulky white "off-road" vehicle, trying to make sense of the spaghetti noodle dirt tracks winding back and forth and disappearing into the thorn brush.  Where in the world was the road that led to the church? They'd said there was one...

Suddenly we saw a man in his best suit pedaling a bike towards us along one of the paths, over the bumps, around the washed out holes the size of a barrel, around the thorn bushes every two feet. It was the pastor of the church.

He'd seen our vehicle, a small white dot in the distance and took off pedaling the whole way out to guide us in on his bike. It struck me how different this culture was from my own where the typical American might say it was too far to go out of their way on foot or a bike (this certainly wasn't a mountain bike and it was not as easy as most mountain bike tracks!)- let alone the fact that they weren't dressed for biking or breaking a sweat.

His willingness to do what it took with what he had to help us white folks out in our big "off-road" vehicle struck a chord with me.   I realized that tenacity was something I'd spent years in the out-door field trying to encourage back into the lives of average Americans through trips into the wilderness. I made a note to encourage the community groups about the wealth of tenacity that I observe.