Honorary Maasai
Sekerot guides his new “brother”
Married in the first “outsider” wedding ceremony that Kenya's famed Maasai tribe hosted in 15+ years, Jason was honored as a new family member of this historic tribe. Filmed by Kenyan Broadcasting Company, the Maasai community came from up to 100 miles to celebrate.
Jason and April collaborated with their new brother Sekerot for well over 10 years, including creating a website to help support Sekerot’s budding new ecologically and culturally sustainable Masai Mara homestay enterprise. Here’s a little of his story…
The Maasai tribe of Kenya's famed Maasai Mara. I'd visited before and fell in love, and my fiancee had always wanted to go ... so we decided that somehow we would figure out to have a wedding ceremony there. The more we researched, though, the more it seemed not only impossible to have an authentic Maasai tribal ceremony ... it seemed impossible to even have a real experience or a homestay with the Maasai people.
By sheer luck (and with the help of many friends), we met Sekerot, an educated Maasai warrior who is working to save the Maasai culture by providing ecologically and culturally sustainable facilities ... a place in the Mara where the Maasai people can retain their culture and still have a place to live as the national parks push them out of their traditional lands.
So in February of 2011, April (my fiancee) and I travelled to Kenya's famed Mara. En route to Leganishu -- Sekerot's "village" -- we saw a lioness, giraffes, elephants, and more wildlife than you can imagine if you haven't been there. We were scared, though, of what we would encounter at the village: would we end up in a manyatta that wasn't "Western-friendly"? Would the food be okay for us? Would we be gently roughing it ... or fiercely worried about our survival?
It turns out that Sekerot has created a wonderful Maasai village -- not luxurious, mind you, yet authentic, safe, warm, and fairly comfortable. (We even had hot water!) His family adopted us, and we had the most amazing traditional Maasai wedding ceremony you could ever imagine. (We hear it was the first outsider wedding in the Mara in 15 years!) They even renamed us -- I am now Saruni, and April is Nasieku.
We fell in love with the people, with the lifestyle, with the culture, and with our new family. When we came back we felt it was our responsibility to share this with the world ... with YOU, actually, if you're reading this. As a web designer I chose to do what I know: to create a website for this tribe that seems as far from civilization as you could get.