For the week before I met Sheila, I’d seen Maasai women from a distance, tending to their children or plastering their homes with mud and dung.

I had seen hundreds of tall, lean Maasai men walking by the side of Tanzanian roads.

They wore the traditional red shuka and carried staffs and spears, and sometimes cell

My husband with our guide and the Maasai chief

phones.  They often smiled and waved at us white tourists in our Range Rovers.

I loved the adolescent male Maasai, their faces still painted from their ceremonial circumcisions, who seemed, given the circumstances, surprisingly jaunty.  They ran up to our jeep and posed for us, sometimes asking for money when we took their pictures.

I eagerly anticipated the morning we were scheduled to spend in a Maasai village.  After lumbering down from the tall vehicle, a small woman—probably under 5’– walked purposefully up to me and reached for my hand.

She flashed a big toothy smile, then pointed to herself and said, “Sheila.”  I pointed to myself and said, “Sandy.”  For the next two hours, she never forgot my name, and she never stopped smiling as she urged me to participate in her village culture.

I was glad my husband was taking pictures because I didn’t want to be distracted, didn’t want to break the lock Sheila’s eyes had on mine.   I wanted to remember her brilliant white teeth, her stretched earlobes adorned with beaded earrings, her delicate features, her small frame.

The other women in our travel group also had Maasai buddies who shepherded them around from one activity to another.

The local women tried to teach us how to weave baskets.  Sheila didn’t know the English words for “two over, one under” (or “klutz”), but she used her small hands to show me.  I was a poor student, and I couldn’t get the hang of it, despite her tutelage.  I shrugged my shoulders at the mess I’d made with the reeds, and still she smiled.

Like good teachers everywhere, Sheila tried to discern my strengths.  Perhaps I could make jewelry.  She showed me how to string tiny plastic beads on wire, but I couldn’t figure out which line of my trifocals to look out of, so she finished up,  poking the beads with quick precision, then twisted the wire to enclose the bracelet on my wrist.

It was time to bleed the cow.  Of course it was.  Cow’s blood is used to enrich milk, a staple of the Maasai  diet.  As the Maasai population has grown (about 800,000 in Tanzania) and modernization has encroached on their grazing land, the cow blood is more dear and is usually saved for celebrations (and commercial opportunities with tourists).

Our group was supposed to follow the men to the pasture for the bloodletting, but as soon as Sheila let go of my hand I walked in the opposite direction to a clutch of little boys.  Sheila emphatically waved me to the field, but I was undeterred.  In this land of exotic animals, not just rangy cows, but elephants and wildebeests, zebras and giraffes, it was always the humans I wanted to engage.  Especially the kids.  Sheila finally shrugged her shoulders, the teacher equivalent of whattayagonnado.

I wanted to talk to these three boys who were so contentedly playing together with one stick in the dirt.  They were slender but looked nourished and healthy, and they smiled.  And smiled.

I showed them my iPhone and asked, using gestures, if I could take their pictures.  They knew exactly what to do, cheesing it up as I clicked.  I was not their first tourist.  I leaned down and handed them my phone so they could look at the picture.  They giggled as they bent over the image.

One of the little guys deftly enlarged the picture by pinching the image and drawing it out.  They were loving my phone, and I was worried it might get ugly when I needed it back, but when I put my hand out, the boys immediately relinquished it.

I put my camera in selfie mode and gestured for the kids to take their own pictures, which they did, expertly. These kids who live, contentedly, it would seem, without electricity, running water, or plumbing, were using my camera app as proficiently as I did.    I couldn’t help thinking that the more technology they got, the less happy they’d be.  Surely, a stick would never be enough again.

The group of 15 tourists returned to the village, and one of the females was sporting a blood mustache, an innovation on the Got Milk? campaign. We were told by our guide that it was kind of a big deal that a woman was given the honor of drinking this liquid strength. Not sure that was the equality Gloria Steinem had in mind.

Then it was time for Dress Ups.  Sheila draped bright fabric over my shoulders, pleating and tucking to fashion a sort of caftan. Sheila was so much shorter and smaller than I; I wondered what she thought about a rich white American of such girth. She laughed as she reached up and I stooped down to get the costume on.  Accessories are everything, as all girls know.  Sheila completed my ensemble with a huge beaded collar and demonstrated how I should shrug my shoulders as I danced.  It was not exactly poetry in motion.

I moved to the back of the crowd when one of the other Maasai women looked for volunteers to apply by hand the dung and mud plaster to one of the huts.  I did not volunteer to climb the ladder to weave the straw roof of a hut either, fearing my big American ass would crash through said roof.  Sheila seemed to understand my hesitancy and did not urge me on.

One of the chief’s three wives invited us into her bomba (hut).  It may seem like an oxymoron, but there was a clean dirt floor, one that the Lady of the Hut had recently swept smooth.  There was something like shelves in this first chamber where the children could sleep.  The parents’ sleeping quarters were separated by a piece of fabric.

Sixteen tourists huddled in the front room of the hut, and the chief and our guide patched together a global mesh of English, Swahili, and Maa to answer our questions.

When we left the hut, I saw the display of beaded jewelry the Maasai women had arranged while we were inside.

I knew the custom was to bargain, but I didn’t know where to start the bidding or how to make my desires known.  Boniface, our guide, helped me with the little bit of Maa he knew.  I didn’t want to insult the women with a low price, but I had no clue as to a fair amount to offer.  I do know that the necklaces, earrings, and collars took a long time to make, even in the village women’s practiced hands.  I wanted them to know how much I would cherish their art.  I pressed the necklaces I bought to my heart to convey my delight.

Before I returned to the jeep, I was able to steal a few more minutes with Sheila so I could share photos of my family and city.  Rick snapped a candid picture of us, and I am happy to see that she was still smiling.  When I showed her the picture of me with my mom, she said, “Mama.”

I said, “Yes, but she died.”  I know she didn’t understand my words, but she read my face, gave me a sympathetic look, and reached up to pat my back.

A couple years have passed.  I have replayed so many memories of that trip.  How I surprised myself by rooting for the lion stalking the herd of zebra.  How I listened to the hyenas howling from the relative safety of my bush tent.  How I learned that Boniface, our guide, was the surviving child of six, as his siblings had succumbed to AIDS.  How I stared like a middle schooler as a bull elephant “romanced” a half dozen cows.  (He had a very impressive delivery system, which natives refer to as the “fifth leg.”)

My tenderest memories, though, are of my time with Sheila.  I want to believe that for a brief time we were sisters, fellow citizens of the world.  That our hearts were open and that we understood each other in a way women just do.  I hope she knew I admired the pastoral lifestyle and unspoiled children, her hard work and her ingenuity.

And I want to believe that Sheila had a good time while I was there and a good feeling about me after I left.   Even though she never stopped smiling, I will never know.  Like her children, she knew the ways of tourists.  Her village was compensated—as they should have been—for their hospitality.

These cultural intersections are complicated.  Can you believe all you see?

What I saw was a peaceful village with a traditional division of labor, but how were the women really treated in this patriarchal, polygamous society? How was Sheila raised?  Was she a victim of circumcision? And those boys?  How would they fair from their primitive circumcision ceremony?  These were questions we didn’t ask, of course.

Perhaps Sheila resented these orchestrated interactions. Maybe she felt tourists studied her as an artifact, like a wax figure in a museum.  Did she feel objectified, demeaned, othered?

I hope she remembers me, but really, is that likely?   Sheila’s thoughts of me probably vanished before the Range Rover drove away.  And it is possible that if we met again, Sheila wouldn’t even answer to that name, because surely it was not a tribal name, the one her mother called her.  Perhaps a Christian missionary gave her the name.

Or maybe “Sheila” is the name she adopted for interactions with tourists, a name that feels comfortable in foreign mouths.  If this is the case, I am sad she thought she had to be anything but who she was.

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