Of overgrown trails and plastic lawn chairs,
Of more rain and mud and rice and wind,
Of cow-milking and 54 students to a classroom,
Of generations stretched against tradition and future

“Pole, pole.” My knees and thighs complain against another “short walk,” an ascent that lasts two hours. The traveler sicknesses that attack each of us double-down on my own intestines, and I stay behind one morning to talk with Hassan, a Muslim Maasai. He pulls down his shuka to answer his cell phone. When I ask him which of these lands belong to the Maasai, he quietly confides that “All lands belong to Maasai.” Politics does not interest him.

It is a slow morning, like each day we meet here. Across the valleys and hills of rural Tanzania, the work starts early, quietly, with these people carrying timber on bicycles, water and grains atop their heads, poverty through the villages. But there seems no want, little misery. Baba tells us that Njoro village needs clean water, and we believe him; the satellite TVs tell them all that more is to be had, but this sort of aspiration does not confess itself here.

Hassan reminds me that the indigenous Maasai choose their own future in this modern-ing world. They keep their dance, their pastoral lives and markets, their circumcision rites, and their celebratory slaughter of our fire-cooked goat last night, but they welcome schools and send their people to universities. They make business deals with tourist companies; they design websites.

In Selling the Serengeti, we read that the Western conceit is that the conservation of nature relies upon the removal of humans from the world of wildlife. The Maasai belie this idea, demonstrating that their lifestyle adapts to any environment. They have lived for centuries at peace with this wilderness: why should I doubt they can adapt to this new modern-ing, as well?