Tomboys

We have around 60 goats and sheep here on the farm in Kitengela and that’s pretty wealthy by local Maasai standards. I say this because one of the locals exchanged his car for 30 goats. Well, there were extenuating circumstances because he had sold part of his shamba (land) and bought the car and then went on to squander the rest of the money. When there was nothing left and he couldn’t even fuel the car, he decided to ‘trade it in’ for 30 goats. There needs to be a lot of financial education to Maasai’s who are selling their land in Kitengela like its Christmas. Sorry, I digress. Anyway, every morning we open the shed door and let out the sheep and the goats. They sleep together in one big shed but once they get out in the morning, the sheep go their own way and the goats go their own way to graze in the 40 acres that have grass. It’s not so different with people; girls usually hang out in groups of other girls and the guys hang out with other guys. But there is always that one girl who likes to hang out with the boys. If you’re her, you’re probably running in your mind all the reasons why you don’t like hanging out with girly girls, and why you don’t watch Alejandro or wouldn’t cry just because he kissed Camilla. Most tomboys grow up in family settings where there are all boys and she’s the only girl in the family and so she tends to behave like her brothers. However, she will usually outgrow the tomboy status when her body begins to change and she can no longer hide her new features even when she wears baggy clothes. And in any case, skinny jeans are making it hard for her to dress like that and hang out with the boys who themselves aren’t wearing baggy clothes anymore. So she is slowly being forced into accepting her femininity as she matures and therein lies the struggle with a mini-identity crisis on whether to wear minis or not. There are also those awkward moments when the tomboy likes one of the boys or one of the boys likes her and neither may act on that longing because it will mess with the group dynamics, and it still does even when both or either denies existence of such feelings. The bottom line is that as much as the sheep wants to hang out with the goats, it will still be looked on as a sheep. But she is always welcome to graze with the goats as long as she is ready for when the awkward shows up, because it always does.