Easter Sunday

Easter was a very nice day. We woke up early to go to church in the morning, which was packed. It was a fun service and I have decided that if I ever live here for an extended period of time I will join the church choir because they get to stand in the front and wear matching outfits and dance and shake cool percussion instruments while they sing. On each side, there were also lots of young girls dancing in unison in yellow dresses and clapping their hands as a part of the music. The music itself reminded me of the service I went to in Kenya; a kind of peppy synthesizer with a deep beat and whistles thrown in. The little boy who sat next to me couldn’t keep his legs still, the music was so upbeat, and kept dancing in his seat. All the women in their special church outfits and head coverings made loud trilling sounds at the beginning and end of songs. It was the same sound that the women at Chris’ house had made during the dance.

After church we returned to camp for brunch, and had a feast before heading to Theo’s house. We weren’t sure what to expect, since it was Easter and promised to be more overwhelming than the family gathering at Chris’, but as it turned out it was very relaxed and quiet. We all hung out inside his house and his mom and sister brought us yet another feast and we all sat together and spoke in our three languages and somehow made it work.

Walking back from Theo’s house was nice. It felt like fall; all the corn now towers above my head, and somehow the smell and the feel of the wind remind me of fall at home. Even though the afternoons are still boiling, the evenings are cool and breezy. The sun slants through the trees and across the fields with a kind of golden light and fills you with a contentment and peace that is hard to describe.

As we walked back, Theo, Chris, and their two friends whose names we don’t know because they have been nicknamed “Local wine” and “Milk” decided that they should give us Iraqw names. Unfortunately, Abby and I are not able to pronounce either one. Both include guttural sounds that we just aren’t capable of making… mine is Manaqi, and hers is Aamatli. When we asked them to tell us if they meant anything, they told us that they were common girls’ names, and that Aamatli means “young girl.” They had a hard time explaining mine, and picked some corn off of one of the stalks as we walked. They shucked it and pointed to the corn, saying that this is what Manaqi meant. I still don’t really know what it means but I think it means something like “half-ripened.” Nice.

At night all of the students here decided to dress up and pretend to be different quirky family members at dinner. We were each assigned a different character—mine was the 30-year-old hippie aunt who took her guitar everywhere—and acted them out throughout the night, which was really hilarious. We had a goat roast outside and ate at a candlelit table on the lawn. It was very nice even though I still don’t really love eating goat no matter how hard I try to appreciate it.

Today, on the other hand, began as a disaster. I woke up with a start and remembered that I’d left my notebook on top of my research questionnaires in the covered gazebo outside. I went outside to find my papers scattered everywhere by the wind, including many of the research questionnaires. What a nightmare! Many of them had ink running everywhere and were soaked by the morning dew. I picked them all up and tried not to be too panicked. I was able to find them all in the end and to salvage all of the blurred answers. Whew! A bad way to wake up though. The rest of the day was spent on camp doing work, looking for DC apartments, sending National Geographic information, and typing my questionnaire responses into the stats program we’re using. Hopefully tomorrow I can get my work done early and venture off of camp again- we’re hoping to do a hike to a cool plateau overlooking Lake Manyara nearby!