Seeing through someone else's eyes

            The last month and a half has flown by. Hard to believe that “Where the Sky Meets the Sand” will be officially released in just a few days. Back when I was notified of that magical date, I promised that I would try to post some excerpts from the discarded files, all the scenes that I had to delete because I had too many points of view and was confusing even myself. I mostly needed to cut the scenes told from the perspective of my Maasai characters because I felt that I couldn’t do them justice. I didn’t feel right being in the head of people I hadn’t lived among for more than a few days at time.

            In this scene, the Maasai boy Ole first meets Jenny, the American businesswoman who changes his life just as he changes hers. 

The sun, as it burst upon the horizon, woke the boy in the morning as he slept in the crook of the tree. He cursed himself for being so lazy, so useless. He would simply have to find the lion now as it slept away the day in some shady spot on the savannah.

The boy broke off a piece of chapati and chewed it while he walked. Then he pulled a short stick from a scrubby bush and rubbed the end of it on his teeth, until the fibers of the stick were splayed and tickled his gums, reaching the places between his teeth.

He passed a herd of zebra and several giraffes. When he drank water from a muddy river, he heard the baboons in the trees on the other side. He imagined that they were chastising him for taking their water. He thought he saw a hippo downstream, but couldn’t be sure as they wallow deep into the mud at the bottom of the shallow river until only their nostrils are sticking out.

The boy had never been this far from the village by himself. His innate sense of direction gave him no cause for alarm. He knew he only had to turn around and he could walk right back to his little mud and dung home. But he also knew he couldn’t do that until he had killed the lion and tucked its tail in his pouch.

He heard a rumble in the distance and saw dust rising. As he watched the dust cloud move closer, he sometimes saw a spark of light as if a fire was about to start on this object. Soon, however it was close enough that he could see it was only the sun bouncing off of the metal roof. Leaning all of his slight weight onto his walking stick, he waited.

As the jeep stopped in a cloud of dust next to the boy, he wondered what interesting things would be inside. The driver looked like any other man from his tribe, except that he wore clothes all over his body. The other people – the boy assumed they were people though they didn’t look anything like him – were covered in clothes too. But their skin was bleached the color of white sand, their hair was straight and fine. They had black straps around their necks from which hung black boxes, some large and heavy looking, some small.

There was even a woman in the truck. Her hair was long, down past her shoulders, and it was the color of the sun. Her skin was the lightest, almost pink, and her eyes were the brightest blue. He didn’t even know that people could see with eyes that color. She smiled at him and said something through the open window.

The boy looked at the driver and didn’t say a thing.

A Maasai warrior. Picture taken by my daughter when she lived among the tribe for several months in 2010.