My Weekend Part II
On Saturday morning, after my long journey to Mary’s village and a few hours of relaxing sleep, warmed by two women at my side, I woke up to get dressed in preparation for the ceremony that would be welcoming Mary’s niece back from initiation school. I will take a brief break from describing the day’s activity to explain what initiation school is to the best of my abilities, because I do not fully understand it all myself. Everyone is rather secretive about what goes on there but what I understand is that just before puberty boys and girls both leave home for 3 weeks. Girls learn about their periods and sex and getting older while boys go into the woods and do a bunch of stuff that no-one talk about, besides the understanding that the boys get a circumcision. As I said, no one was really open about what happened in their culture, and I think because I myself was shocked at what happened.
To attend the ceremony Mary’s mom decided that, as her new adopted daughter, she was going to dress me in the finest traditional clothes. The traditional clothes consisted of being wrapped about three times; first in a towel, then in two traditional clothes one to cover the front and one to cover the back. Despite being told that I was supposed to wear my tank top, however, I refused, too cold to willingly take off my long sleeved shirt. She then pulled my hanging hair to the sides of my face and placed a traditional beaded head piece on me. With this I clapped with joy, it was like re-living my child-hood and pretending I was a princess. She then draped my neck and arms in jewels to finish of the dress. Her mom squealed happily telling me to go show papa who laughed and said “oh nice” in his limited English. It was then time for us to go to the girls and prepare for the travels around the village.
Meeting the girls, let’s just say, I was not prepared for what I would encounter. Just a few people were around and when I went to go sit down I found two young girls with nothing but essentially a beaded kilt to cover their bottom and their bodies were painted in mud. They sat silently eating, and as a young girl from a different culture I felt embarrassed for them, which Mary quickly told me not to be because everyone has to go through the same thing. We then followed the girls walking down the road and into a truck of which we stood and sang and danced as it rolled down the road (sorry mom, I know this is horrifying to you to think of your baby unprotected in the back of a driving truck). People honked and cheered as we went by and the other women who knew the dance had handmade rattles tied around their ankles to make their own music with their movements. We arrived back at Mary’s house and danced around in a circle some more, while I was completely not in sync with the beat and then decided to sit down. Mary’s dad introduced me to all of the people there by the name that he gave me and soon everyone was calling me it.
We then went on the back of the truck again and made a trip to the next grandmothers house where we danced some more and sang some more songs. The girls were not allowed to walk into the house grounds each time until money was placed on a mat that was rolled out by the people who lived there, each time they expected about 100 Rands before entering or else they would just keep dancing at the front of the house. Hot and tired from dancing Mary and I struggled to find transport to take us to the football (soccer) match. To be continued in Part III…
