Free Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton by Facing the Lion: Growing Up Maasai on the African Savanna Page B

in the open with the cattle back home, who’d learned to go without food and water all day—and I was helpless. I couldn’t do anything. I started shaking.
    One of the women asked me, “Joseph! Are you okay? Did you eat?”
    I said, “No.”
    “Are you hungry?”
    “No.” Because back home, a warrior never accepts food from a woman. It goes against tradition; if a woman asks if you’re hungry and you say yes, it makes you appear weak. It’s unacceptable. So I said, “No, I’m fine.”
    “Are you cold?”
    “No. I’m fine, really.” This happened several times. They asked me, “Are you sure you don’t want to eat?” and I kept telling them, “No, it’s fine.” I knew it was a long drive; I thought that if I could just go to sleep until the next day, I’d be able to figure out what to do. But finally I couldn’t take it anymore. Part of me was acting on tradition; part of me was worried about embarrassing myself and eating the wrong way—and part of me was thinking, I hope they ask me just one more time. I guess I realized that the state of New York wasn’t going to look down on me if I accepted the offer of a meal.
    The opportunity came at McDonald’s. By then it was about ten o’clock in the evening. “Joseph, we’re stopping at McDonald’s here. Are you sure you’re not hungry?”
    I asked, “Are there any chips?” I didn’t know what chips were called in the United States, but one of the women had been to Europe and she knew.
    “French fries?”
    “Potatoes—chips. Yes!”
    They were so excited. They bought me a big burger and a big order of french fries, and I felt a lot better. And that was my introduction to America—McDonald’s.

Chapter 11
A Warrior in Two Worlds
    The lion ate my favorite cow,
    That gave the most milk.
    The warriors of the mountain,
    The mountains of grass and streams,
    And the life of our people—
    That lion is no more.
    W HEN I TELL MY MOM about the sun—how it doesn’t move—she thinks I’m crazy. I tell her, “Mom, the sun is fixed. It’s the Earth that moves around the sun.”
    She says, “OK, Son. I’m putting this rock here. Let’s see if it’s going to move before tomorrow.” She just doesn’t understand it. If I ask her what she thinks happens, she says, “Well, Son. I think the sun goes down, goes all the way underground, and rises up on the other side of the country.”
    “And how about the stars?”
    “Well, the stars—during the day, they go out and graze, like the cows do. So you don’t see them. At night, they come home and sleep, and we see them up there.”
    That’s all she knows. For her, there’s just nature. Bring science, bring technology to her, and she’ll never really get it. If there’s an eclipse of the moon, she thinks that we did something wrong, and she prays. When I’m home and staying with her in her hut, I’ll sometimes hear her get up in the night and pray: “Thanks for bringing my son home. Thanks for the things you’ve done for me. And bring the moon back!”
    I tell her, “Mom, when I come home, I fly here.” She has no idea where America is. She knows it’s far away, that’s all. She’d never get in a plane. She sees them up there, but they don’t mean anything to her. So I tell her, “My plane leaves at 6:30 in the morning, when you take the cows out. You go the whole day, and the cows come home, and I’m still up in the air. And you sleep, and I’m still traveling, and the next day when you take the cows out again is when I reach America.”
    She says, “All that time, you’re up there?”
    “Yes.”
    “And you eat and move around in the plane?”
    “Yes.”
    And she says, “Son, I don’t believe it. But I trust you. I trust what you’re telling me.”
    The thing is, I spent very little time with my mother when I was growing up. I was away at boarding schools from the age of six, and when I wasn’t at school I was usually at cattle camp with my brothers and the other men. I was