By MONROE ROARK
mroark@thecitizennews.com

Can you imagine anyone not knowing about Sept. 11 until six months or more after the fact?

That seems a total impossibility in the information age, especially for people living in the United States. Most Americans' idea of isolation is probably a small farming town in the heartland or a vast expanse of wilderness in the western part of the country. Even then, the residents in those areas have access to every modern convenience that the rest of us do.

Now think about the current state of the media and the speed with which it gets out the news. When was the last time you first heard about a major world event more than 24 hours after it happened? Probably not in years, unless you went camping or on some type of extreme vacation where that type of isolation was sought after.

That brings us to the Masai tribe living in Kenya, in a remote village near the border with Tanzania. According to news reports, these people, who would be considered primitive by most modern standards of society, just heard about the Sept. 11 attacks a few weeks ago. Actually, they heard about them before that, but they could not understand their magnitude until a native returned from a visit to the United States which included a stay in New York around the time the World Trade Center came down.

Try to imagine, if you can, an adult who has no idea what a skyscraper is. It brings to mind the 1980s movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy," in which a jungle tribe discovers a soft drink bottle thrown from an airplane and thinks that God must have produced it, because it is so unlike anything they have ever seen.

It's likely that these good folks in Kenya live their entire lives in the most basic huts we can imagine, without 99 percent of what you and I take for granted. "You cannot easily describe to them buildings that are so high that people die when they jump off them," said one journalist working in Nairobi.

But once they comprehended the severity of what happened here, they felt obliged to do something. This idea was not new, as New Yorkers have been the recipients of overwhelming generosity from all over the globe in the past nine months. Manhattan residents have received scores of goodwill messages from total strangers, and people across the country have dialed random numbers in the 212 area code to lend their support to those nearest the tragedy.

But what did this Masai tribe do? They rounded up the most prized possessions they could send to this country 14 cows and made a donation to the people of New York. If you have any inkling of the kind of life these people lead, then you know that this gift compares to a town of 5,000 or so people in the United States getting tens of millions of dollars together and sending the money overseas.

Cattle are equal in value only to a child or a plot of land to Masai, according to reports. "They gave what is truly sacred to them," as one person put it.

Apparently, the whole town was behind the effort. Hundreds of Masai attended the ceremony during which tribal elders blessed the cows and presented them to a representative of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi. Some of them made banners with such messages as, "To the people of America, we give these cows to help you," according to an embassy spokesman. What an incredible gift, and what a statement it makes about the lives of these people.

Obviously, materialism is not a problem for them. It's not likely that they have to contend with the rat race every day. The phrase, "It's a jungle out there," means something entirely different over there. But all of us over here can learn something from their largesse.

A friend said to me last week, "You can measure any man in six inches." By that, he was referring to the six-inch strips of paper each of us carry in our wallets.

I don't know what currency, aside from cattle, the Masai tribe uses. But in my mind, they measure up by any standard.

[Monroe Roark can be reached at mroark@TheCitizenNews.com.]

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