Safinieli is one of our nannies at Cradle of Love. I didn't get to know her right away because she doesn't speak English and she is very shy, but working together over the months has naturally brought us closer together. Last month, she got married to one of the ADRA workers, Jona, and invited us to her wedding! Sarah, Lilli, and I were super excited for three reasons. Firstly, because we're girls and we simply love weddings, secondly, because we know and love Safinieli so it would be wonderful to share in this celebration with her, thirdly, this was our first African wedding and we were eager to see what it was like! ...not to mention, I knew the food was going to be good!
It was a splendid evening, but I want to share with you some of the things that I found really funny.
1. The taxi dropped them off at the little walkway to the open-aired building the reception was held in and they had to walk in together with dancing girls leading the way. The walkway was about 5 meters long and it took them about 20 minutes to walk in to the building. Their steps were so small, it didn't even look like they were walking.
2. Safi is really shy, so she looked down the whole entire evening. Her husband seems to be 10x more shy than she is so he tended to look down more than up also. Neither one of them smiled very much at all during the whole thing! The picture of them at the top of this blog is my favorite because Safi is actually smiling. I know they're happy together..I've seen them around at other times as happy as clams, but at their reception, they did a pretty good job of looking really awkward.
3. When they cut the cake, they had their hands on the knife together and started with it up in the air and slowly brought the knife down to cut it. During this process of lowering the knife down to cut the cake together, I counted to 48. It was painstakingly slow. Maybe they did it for the pictures? I don't know why it was so slow, but it made me smile.
4. The MC talked and laughed loudly in Swahili in the microphone the whole time. In between talking, he would put on some music for us all to enjoy...the same music that is often blared in the dala dalas. The wedding party and guests danced whenever they got up from their chairs and we ended up having to dance too as we were in line for food and also as we congratulated the new couple. The best part for me was seeing our two Maasai guards dancing. The best part for everyone else was probably seeing us mzungus dancing!
Despite all these funny aspects, it was a beautiful and cultural program. We had a great time! I'm very happy for Safi and her husband and though this may sound selfish, I kind of hope I get invited to another wedding while I'm here :)
This post made me laugh! I almost always saw Jona (I know him as Johonna) in coveralls or work clothes so I almost didn't recognize him in your pictures! I only noticed that he was the groom in the third to the last picture and then I had to scroll up to make sure it was him in all the rest of the photos, too. You're right, he IS super shy. I never got to know Safi, but I know in ADRA worships Johonna never really spoke up much. My all-time favourite Johonna memory is documented about halfway down this post: http://writingtoserve.blogspot.com/2011/04/highlights4.html. :)
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing the photos! I never got to attend a Tanzanian wedding so it's fun to see one through your camera lens. (PS - TOTALLY wish you had a picture of the CoL guards dancing! Would love to see Justin dancing away. :D)