Good morning!
So this is a blog for Sunday May 15th, 2011
I woke up and jogged the beach with my professor Cherie and a few interns. We had breakfast and then the rest of the interns woke up... an hour or so later? We all ended up on the roof top tanning in the beautiful sunshine! The sun is so much hotter here, I find myself running low on sunscreen! We did get a little rain every few hours which is so refreshing. We just remain lying down and after a few minutes of rain the sun returns and dries us off.
Jesse and myself were invited by the organizer of WFT (our NGO we intern at) to attend a party which is part of the wedding celebration out here. It is a traditional party and we also brought Sienna, another intern, with us to the party.
A wedding consists of three parties: The kitchen party, the send off party, and then the ceremony/reception.
The party we attended was "The Kitchen Party" which is strictly for women only. We were told to arrive at 3:30pm and since we are Canadian... we showed up at 3:15pm only to find out we had beat almost every single person there, including the caterers. Go figure! So we walked around and took some pictures of the church, a cemetery and some flowers. The party started at 5:30pm and it was amusing to see on the "program" for the night it showed the event started at 3pm. Oh how I love African time!!
This event basically consists of dancing and a few speeches and... then at the end you eat. They had songs/dances for different African countries, as well as cities and then certain dances for the bride... etc. Mary was great at explaining a lot to us. The party happens a week before the wedding ceremony and only females are allowed, mainly from the brides side. This party is a big deal for the women. These women
are controlled and very suppressed by their husbands, and so their husbands don't want them at this party for a few reasons. First reason is that the conversations the women have will give the women "new ideas" like... standing up for themselves! And the second reason is that if they complain to the other women about their abuse, such as being beaten or abused then the other women will tell someone else and the husband will get talked to and told to stop beating their wife... at which point the husband has to stop. So, while all these
women were their.. the husbands watched from the vehicles and called them constantly. It seemed so unfair to these women that their husbands wouldn't even leave them alone! However, most of the women
ignored the phone calls for the first few hours and only when it was close to the end of the dancing, when dinner was about to take place, was when I saw them answering their phones. This party is where the wives can dressed up and feel free to express themselves and do something for themselves. It was truly an honor to be welcomed into this night of refuge.
We danced one of the circle dances where everyone dances in a huge circle to a few songs. We did not have much interaction with anyone other than each other. Mary got a picture of us dancing, which I will try to post sometime soon. After that we returned to our seats and watched others dance. We were slightly isolated and only greeted when someone greeted Mary and then they felt obligated. Something cool about their greeting is they do the handshake like boys do or like young friends do their own handshakes. I thought it was interesting to see even the old ladies doing it to greet everyone.
After a few more dances one of the younger women came over and invited us to come dance with them. This was just dancing wherever on the floor and not in any formation. We all went out there and danced our takos off. For the first song or two the women would were dancing with us seemed to be passing us off to one another kind of like they were doing there "good deed" of dancing with the wazungu [white people] and then literally pulling a friend into the circle and then running off to dance with others. We did not mind and just kept dancing until these two older ladies joined us and actually cheered us on and stayed the whole time. I guess these thought we did not suck too bad! We laughed and took turns dancing in the middle of our circle while the rest cheered. It was SO much fun. We also noticed that the camera guy would point the camera right at us every time we was on our dance floor [there were two dance floors]. I was not sure if they did that cause we were the wazungu or if they wanted to make fun of our dancing later. In any case, we were spotlighted all night with photographers taking our pictures all night. It was really obvious and awkward at some points and they would get rather close to our faces and it happened at least a dozen times. hahaha, It felt like I was famous or something (reminder: I do not want to be famous). We finally sat down after we sweat off a few litres and Mary and her friends from the table went up and danced. It was really cute though, as we walked back to our seats all these women were smiling at us and saying "good job" pretty much. I did notice while we were up their dancing EVERYONE from the tables were staring at us... good fun!
Our driver came at 7:30pm, just as the food was coming out. So we quickly grabbed some African food that I could not tell you all of what it was, scarfed it and ran out of there. On our way out one of the photographers tried to sell us our photos. So, for 4000 tsh we bought all 5 of the pictures. Two group ones and then an individual picture of each of us. haha
Got home exhausted and talked for a little but very quickly crashed as I was exhausted.
So this is a blog for Sunday May 15th, 2011
I woke up and jogged the beach with my professor Cherie and a few interns. We had breakfast and then the rest of the interns woke up... an hour or so later? We all ended up on the roof top tanning in the beautiful sunshine! The sun is so much hotter here, I find myself running low on sunscreen! We did get a little rain every few hours which is so refreshing. We just remain lying down and after a few minutes of rain the sun returns and dries us off.
Jesse and myself were invited by the organizer of WFT (our NGO we intern at) to attend a party which is part of the wedding celebration out here. It is a traditional party and we also brought Sienna, another intern, with us to the party.
A wedding consists of three parties: The kitchen party, the send off party, and then the ceremony/reception.
The party we attended was "The Kitchen Party" which is strictly for women only. We were told to arrive at 3:30pm and since we are Canadian... we showed up at 3:15pm only to find out we had beat almost every single person there, including the caterers. Go figure! So we walked around and took some pictures of the church, a cemetery and some flowers. The party started at 5:30pm and it was amusing to see on the "program" for the night it showed the event started at 3pm. Oh how I love African time!!
This event basically consists of dancing and a few speeches and... then at the end you eat. They had songs/dances for different African countries, as well as cities and then certain dances for the bride... etc. Mary was great at explaining a lot to us. The party happens a week before the wedding ceremony and only females are allowed, mainly from the brides side. This party is a big deal for the women. These women
are controlled and very suppressed by their husbands, and so their husbands don't want them at this party for a few reasons. First reason is that the conversations the women have will give the women "new ideas" like... standing up for themselves! And the second reason is that if they complain to the other women about their abuse, such as being beaten or abused then the other women will tell someone else and the husband will get talked to and told to stop beating their wife... at which point the husband has to stop. So, while all these
women were their.. the husbands watched from the vehicles and called them constantly. It seemed so unfair to these women that their husbands wouldn't even leave them alone! However, most of the women
ignored the phone calls for the first few hours and only when it was close to the end of the dancing, when dinner was about to take place, was when I saw them answering their phones. This party is where the wives can dressed up and feel free to express themselves and do something for themselves. It was truly an honor to be welcomed into this night of refuge.
We danced one of the circle dances where everyone dances in a huge circle to a few songs. We did not have much interaction with anyone other than each other. Mary got a picture of us dancing, which I will try to post sometime soon. After that we returned to our seats and watched others dance. We were slightly isolated and only greeted when someone greeted Mary and then they felt obligated. Something cool about their greeting is they do the handshake like boys do or like young friends do their own handshakes. I thought it was interesting to see even the old ladies doing it to greet everyone.
After a few more dances one of the younger women came over and invited us to come dance with them. This was just dancing wherever on the floor and not in any formation. We all went out there and danced our takos off. For the first song or two the women would were dancing with us seemed to be passing us off to one another kind of like they were doing there "good deed" of dancing with the wazungu [white people] and then literally pulling a friend into the circle and then running off to dance with others. We did not mind and just kept dancing until these two older ladies joined us and actually cheered us on and stayed the whole time. I guess these thought we did not suck too bad! We laughed and took turns dancing in the middle of our circle while the rest cheered. It was SO much fun. We also noticed that the camera guy would point the camera right at us every time we was on our dance floor [there were two dance floors]. I was not sure if they did that cause we were the wazungu or if they wanted to make fun of our dancing later. In any case, we were spotlighted all night with photographers taking our pictures all night. It was really obvious and awkward at some points and they would get rather close to our faces and it happened at least a dozen times. hahaha, It felt like I was famous or something (reminder: I do not want to be famous). We finally sat down after we sweat off a few litres and Mary and her friends from the table went up and danced. It was really cute though, as we walked back to our seats all these women were smiling at us and saying "good job" pretty much. I did notice while we were up their dancing EVERYONE from the tables were staring at us... good fun!
Our driver came at 7:30pm, just as the food was coming out. So we quickly grabbed some African food that I could not tell you all of what it was, scarfed it and ran out of there. On our way out one of the photographers tried to sell us our photos. So, for 4000 tsh we bought all 5 of the pictures. Two group ones and then an individual picture of each of us. haha
Got home exhausted and talked for a little but very quickly crashed as I was exhausted.
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