Yaida Valley Activities

The people of the Yaida valley are the Hadza. They are a hunter-gatherer tribe. They share what they obtain with each other. The society is egalitarian. The only thing that isn't shared completely is honey because honey can be sold for money to pay school fees or to purchase cell-phones, although cell-phones are shared amongst the different tribal members. Their language has clickls in it, one of which is indicated with an ! when it is written down. The first full day we were there, we went down to where they had set up camp. We went with the women to watch them gather. The main thing they seemed to be gathering was a root that they called !ekwa. I don't remember the English or Swahili name for it. There was a lot of moisture in the root. It might be a good dry season source of water for the Hadza. That afternoon we had the opportunity to do some bead work or make arrows. I chose to make an arrow. To straighten the wood, the Hadza use fire to heat up the wood so that it is easier to bend. For the tip, they use a flattenned nail. They must have used stones before they had contact with westerners. Mine turned out okay, but some where along the way that day I lost track of it. I don't know if anyone managed to get his or hers back to his or her home. The following day, we walked across the valley to the next campsite we were staying at. It was about a 9 mile hike. The unimogs (the trucks we drove around in) carried our bags. It was a pretty nice hike although by the end of it it got pretty hot. On the 18th, we split into groups and went out hunting with two hadza men. We got kind of close to catching a few medium-sized animals, but they got away. They did manage to catch a hyrax, which resembles a rodent, but is actually cousin to the elephant. We got really close to a wart hog. The hadza were gathering honey when we noticed a warthog just standing there, maybe 10 yards away from the two Hadza. Unfortunately, by the time they got their bows ready, the wart hog had run away. Back to the hyra, after walking around for a couple more hours, and eating a small amount of honey, we went back to camp. There we turned over the hyrax to the women who were going to cook it. They roasted it over the fire with the fur and everything still on it. As the hair began to burn, they peeled off the fur and hair. Unfortunately, the hyrax was a female and was pregnant. :(. Later that day, I watched a goat being slaughtered. One of the guys in our group slit it's throat. I watched the gutting process, and I got to see the stomach contents, which consisted of grass, digested to various degrees depending on the stomach it was in. Unluckily, the goat was also pregnant. The hadza eat every part of the animal that they kill including the all the organs. They even eat the fetuses. The hadza are a cool tribe because they are a window into the human past.