A Week of Firsts

I went to my first African concert last week! When we got to the village, everyone was asking us if we were going to go to the concert. I didn’t really know you could have a concert in a village in the middle of the bush, but it turns out you can. Jenny ended up inviting us to sit with her in some “reserved seats.” She told us to meet her at her house at 7 pm, but our family’s dinner ended a little late so we didn’t make it to her house until about 7:30 pm. Well, we ended up hanging out there until after 9 when we finally left for the concert. And it turns out the “reserved seats” were chairs that we took ourselves…don’t worry, the children carried them for all of us. Well when we got to the concert it was chaos like I’ve never seen before. There were even these guards with whips standing at the entrance. And yes, they did use the whips on some people…I was actually a little scared, but I just kept smiling my big white girl smile and making sure I stuck close to Jenny. Once we got inside, which was really still outside, we set our chairs down and sat in them. Every once in a while some guys would come tell us to scoot back and we would. Then the concert started and all I could tell was that he kept singing people’s last names over and over again. The awesome part was that he kept singing my last name the most because it’s a really big Sunny name. People were walking up to the stage to pay him to say their last name…it’s a pretty big deal. It was just so funny to see the different ways they do things over here. There was no rhyme or reason to the way they got people in the doors…well except for the whips, of course…or the way people were seated inside. And the music itself is insane, not at all what I expected. We left early because the village wears you right the heck out and the concert went on until 1 am. The music was so loud that you could hear it very, very clearly back at our hut, but I of course listened to my iPod and drowned it out.

Last week, I ate my very first innards. I’ve found that once I get the intestine/whatever it is in my mouth, I just hold it there with my tongue away from it so that I kind of forget about it…you know, kind of try to trick my gag reflex. Then maybe I sing a little song or laugh at H-Mama or something. Then I swallow it whole. You don’t want any part of chewing that.

We went to the gardens last week for my first time. Until the hot season hit the girls went pretty much every morning, but now there’s not much that will grow so we haven’t gone as much. The women all go and drop buckets down into the wells (which are pretty much dried up right now), dump the water into other buckets and tell us where to carry them and what to water. It’s pretty hard work, but the water spills out of the bucket a little bit and cools you off.


Well, it finally happened. Until last night, my African experience has been relatively spider and scorpion free…nothing too scary anyway. I can handle lizards, frogs and rodents, but spiders really terrify me. Last night there were these 2 HUGE spider scorpion monsters on our porch in G-Vegas. I promptly ran back inside and stood on a chair while Denise and Sarah attacked them with shoes. Our house isn’t exactly sealed off to the outside world either, so it took a while for me to fall asleep.