So I really need to apologize to all of you, I’ve been the worst blogger ever lately! But I’ve had limited internet, so I don’t feel too bad about it :P
I have few stories, so I’m just going to post them in somewhat chronologically.
8 Mars (March 8th, International Women’s Day)
8 Mars is also celebrated as a national holiday here, meaning that there is no school and everyone has a party! The women fonctionaire’s group decided to host a festival and invited other women’s groups to party with us. We were at the Eliane’s house, one of the nurses and president of the fonctionaire’s group. We all came over the night before to fry up some fish, then arrived early that morning to start cooking all the food. We made rice and spaghetti, as well as zoom-koom (a drink made from millet flour and flavored with ginger and mint, it’s really good!), ginger juice (very spicy), and bissap (hibiscus tea). I helped with the zoom-koom and generally tried to stay out of the way. The rice and spaghetti were made in generally the same way, cooking the carbs up with some tomatoes, onions, carrots and green peppers mixed in. They added some sort of leaf to the rice and it turned out really good. They were both cooked in giant pots (maybe 50+ liters) over a fire. As we were preparing, the other women’s groups dropped by lots and lots of tô, so there was no way anyone was going to be hungry at this party!
After cooking all the food, everyone went home to change into their party clothes and take an afternoon nap. We all came back, ate lunch, and started dancing!! Although my village has no electricity, women need to go to the neighborhood well to get water one bucket at time, and most people cook over a fire; they have rocking sound systems. As we were setting up for the day, these kids came in pushing giant speakers in wheelbarrows. They connected these speakers to a dvd/mp3 player, and powered this all with car batteries. And that, my friends, is how you have a party in Africa. They had the music pumping and we were all dancing around under the mango tree.
It was really fun, some of my students came and I made them dance with me. Mostly because they were laughing at me (it was probably the first time they’d ever seen a white person dance, they weren’t doing it to be mean), but either way, I showed them :P
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