The most valued skill a Barabaig elder can possess is the ability to make rain.  No permanent rivers run through the land where the Barabaig live around Mount Hanang, an extinct volcano in north-central Tanzania.  During the dry season, May through October, water is so scarce that Barabaig boys guide their herds of cattle many miles each day in search of crater lakes.  These occasional sources of water may sink to such low levels and become so brackish that cattle can drink from them only on alternate days.  During such droughts, the young men dig wells next to the edges of the lakes so water will rise through the natural filter of freshly turned earth before cattle can drink it.

The rain-making ceremony of the Barabaig involves animal sacrifice.  A male elder commands younger men to bring him a sheep at one of the crater lakes.  The sheep, which has a sacred but not a protected status, is dipped in water.  When it gets up and shakes water in all directions, the natural forces of rainmaking are unleashed.  The men take the animal  to a homestead and strangle it while the women sing religious songs to the god Aset.

After butchering and consuming the sheep, the Barabaig make strips of its skin and hang them on fig trees.  Rain should begin to fall shortly thereafter.  Sometimes, the charm works too well.  If the showers become torrents, so heavy that they kill birds in the trees, another sheep will have to be sacrificed to reverse the charm and ward off calamity.

A Barabaig homestead resembles a Maasai boma in many respects.  The Barabaig build stick structures with thick dirt roofs.  Several of these will be arranged in a figure-eight pattern and encircled by a fence of thorny acacia.  The Barabaig, like their fierce enemies, the Maasai, bring cattle into the center of the homestead at night to protect them from predators.   

Mount Hanang dominates the landscape of the Barabaig homeland.  An extinct volcano, it stands 11,215 feet high, between 35° and 36 east longitude and 4° and 5° south latitude.  Barabaig homesteads dot the landscape, built at strategic points along the peripatetic routes of the cattle herders.  A man may have several wives and several homesteads, traveling among them throughout the year.  The homesteads may be temporary, but the pastoral way of life, beleaguered by modernization, somehow persists.