wow

you guys are doing sweet stuff! i love this blog. i thought i was done posting anything out of the ordinary, but the sweat lodge and the cool traveling kayaking snorkeling inspired me to post more.

three things to share:
1. i eat meat. i ate dog this weekend (one bite, with tears in my eyes, and i will never do it again, but i had to do it for the experience). then i was brave and ordered cordon bleu in a restaurant. ate some of the cheese out of it, saw it was still raw, sent it back, ordered a pizza, and still had to pay for the cordon bleu. i am still alive, even though it was raw pork. that was over 24 hours ago, so i think i will survive.

2. i just got really positive feedback on the work ive done this summer and i no longer feel like i am living in a beautiful place and being useless. this is great. living somewhere beautiful and doing something.

3. i sent this in an email to someone, and b/c you all are sharing these sorts of things, i am sharing it with you too:

This is how my weekend went. Its hard to explain, but worth trying. So, in the mountains, Kabiye have initiation ceremonies every year. Every 5th year, they have a special one called waaya (pronounced wa). It was this weekend. Saturday night, I went up to Kuwde, the village we visit in up there. It was CRAZY. The village has 65 households, so imagine a town spread around a ridge, of 700 or so people. For the ceremony, there were thousands of people in town. And, the homestead we stay in is a very important house, so many of the iniates were in and out all weekend. They come with gongs, horns, singing, etc. 24/7. beer 24/7. There are between 100 and 200 initiates, males around the age of 25. And all of their siblings and parents, fanning them, chasing them around, and just lots of craziness. And that’s only the beginning!

Saturday night, they dance in one of two sacred forests-one for the female clan and one for the male clan (all initiates for waaya are male, but they are assigned to a gendered clan) and we eat locust beans in oil. (think, middle of the night, woods on a mountain, dancing, loud music and singing, and a really cute child that had the most adorable laugh in the world and was really easy to make laugh. Her name was elizabeth. Everything I said made her laugh). I wore flip flops, hiking up and down this incredibly rocky mountainside, in the dark and I didn’t fall once. And it was cool because there is no electricity, but there are flashlights and gas lanterns so you could see lines of people moving up and down the mountainside in the distance by looking at the bobbing lights. We sleep in a house/hut in the homestead and people literally are banging iron gongs in the courtyard (about 10 feet away from my head) off and on all night long. By 6 in the morning, the homestead is surrounded by people, such that I can’t spit my toothpaste out the window because it will land on someone. And, I have great pictures of this, about 40 or so of the initiates’ horns were in the granary in our homestead. They are so cool! Covered in chicken feathers, ornaments, and plastic dolls. Some with santa claus. So they all come in, get them, and head out to have them tied on, dance all day, go up and down hills (it was really intense hiking, the initiates actually all wore shoes but most of the people wear flip flops) and then end the morning with a ‘race’ down a steep rock covered uncultivated side of a ridge. Except, the race was a little anticlimactic because only some of them actually raced! The rest chickened out and came down the way we did. Didn’t even go slowly down the steep way. Then they head to various homesteads and continue dancing, which they will do all week.

We, on the other hand, headed down the mountain, took a ride back to the city, and went to a 4th of July party. It was full of people in red, white, and blue, us in our sweaty hiking clothes, children with painted faces, a trampoline, hotdogs, corndogs, veggies, dessert, sparklers, and DEVILLED EGGS. Devilled eggs are one of my favorite holiday comfort foods ever. For every holiday. It was pretty wonderful.