Unboxing for a New Product and Display!

Hey, Birch House friends, welcome back. Today, we have something a little bit different than our usual Hey Birch House. We're doing an unboxing. I recently won something, and this was shipped by our friend over at Jerry Berg, who heads up the Swordsmanship Museum and Academy, and he sent us something, and he said he felt he had something extra to the box that I don't know what it is. So, totally unnecessary, but incredibly kind. So, let's open up, and let's look at the main thing that I got from here, and I want to talk about why I got it. So, just slice this open here. Okay, I see one thing. I won't grab that just yet. Let's grab the main thing. Let's get it open here, and this is an original, and this is a Maasai shield, an African shield. Now, I'm going to set this aside. I'm going to open up the other things, and I'm going to come back to this and talk about why I wanted to get this. Let's see here. To go along with it, we have some sticks to go along with it that are super cool, and finally, it looks like that maybe is a drum, or, oh, I'm pretty certain, correct me if I'm wrong, I'm pretty certain this is a powder flask. You see some that are in this style. In fact, you can see even a little metal piece here that I imagine would have had a chain that would have gone to the stopper up here to hold the powder in, but very cool extra piece. We have to do a little bit of research, make sure I'm right on that. This is what that is. Jerry, thank you very much. That was totally unnecessary, but it was incredibly generous, so thank you. Let's talk about the shield for a moment, because I got this for a few different reasons. One, we have been looking at African shields as of late. It's one of the things I'd like to offer at Birch House Workshop is African shields, and I didn't know if I wanted to do something like a Zulu shield or a Maasai shield like this, among other tribes and cultures, but this is really, really cool, and you can see this is a hide. It is just a hide shield. It's been painted, and it does have a reinforcement that is sewn along the edge, not terribly unlike something like a Viking shield or even like some kite or heater shields we see. Now, like I said, one of the reasons we wanted to get this is because we did want to start looking at offering some kind of African shield, and this was a good way for us to get one, look at it, and maybe reverse engineer a little bit. The other reason that I wanted to get this is something we've talked about is having an African display as part of our interactive educational displays. Now, when I say African, here's the thing about Africa. It's way down the list of things that people research and know about. It's American, European history, Japan, China, and then everything else, and at the very bottom of that list is Africa. So much so that Africa gets lumped in as Africa, and that's really a disservice. Africa is a continent. It is a multitude of countries with each country having a multitude of tribes and cultures. It's such a disservice to just lump Africa as one historical talking point. So we knew that going into this, we were going to look at a specific culture, a specific tribe, a specific group of people to base our display on. We wanted to hyper-focus and really pay due diligence and really do a good service in being respectful in having a display set up for some kind of culture. We've kicked around lots of things, Zulu, Dahomey, Maasai. I don't know where we're going to go exactly just yet. It's still a work in progress, but this is kind of the beginning of our research and the beginning of our looking into what culture, what group of people we want to talk about. If you have a particular group that you're really fascinated by, you want to see more of, you would like to see us push towards, put a comment below. I'd love to hear your thoughts, but we do want to have an African culture represented alongside our medieval European knights, alongside our Japanese samurai and alongside all the groups that we have our Vikings. So like I said, comment below if you have something in particular you're interested in. Otherwise, this is a really cool shield and you can expect to see African shields coming, if not this year in the next year or two. It is something we're pushing for. I don't know exactly what tribe and culture shield we're going to offer just yet, but we are going to have something. Jerry, this is incredible. Thank you so much for the shield and the sticks and the little extra, hopefully I'm right about this, powder flask. Thank you so much. I do greatly appreciate it and thank all of you for watching and we'll see you all in the next video.