Cinquantinaire!

written Sept. 23, 2010
So the Independence Day celebration in my village was actually pretty cool, albeit exhausting. It was an all day thing starting at 8 am and finishinglate into the night. The first thing that we did was raise the flag. Everyone was all dressed up in their outfits made with the Cinquantenaire fabric. Amazingly enough I was wearing the exact same fabric as my homologue, even though I had only bought it the day before and had picked it out because I hadn't seen very many people with it. In fact only a handfull of people had the same fabric as us. The Mayor and the Premiere Adjoint (kind of like the 2nd in command under the mayor) were two other people with the same fabric, so basically I unitentionally dressed as a VIP. This worked out perfectly because, as usual, I spent the whole day with the VIPs. After the raising of the flag was the start of the bike race. It seems like almost every village in Mali had a bike race (I feel like this is a very French influence, very Tour de France-esque). There were probably 8 men racing and I've been told that they biked 52K total. It took them about 2 hours to complete the race. While the bike race was going on there was a lot of dancing to the balofone and drums and a lot of speech making. There were also a lot of games for the kids to play, one of which was very similar to musical chairs! There was also a 1k foot race and tons and tons more dancing. I tried to take videos and pictures of everything. I even got pictures of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners of the bike race. The most amazing thing is that they all raced in those jelly shoes that I described in a previous blog entry. A couple of the dudes were even wearing cut-off jean shorts. None of them looked like they were participating in a bike race, but I guess they were wearing what they had. Around 1 we broke for lunch. A huge group of men and I went to the Mairie (Mayor's Office) and had lunch there. There was a massive amount of Tigadegena (Peanut Butter Stew) and Rice for us to eat. We all sat in circles of 4-8 around a communal bowl. This made me cringe because there was no soap in sight and I didn't see very many buckets of water so this meant that not only would I be washing my hands without soap, but I would also be washing them with dirty water and then eating with them. The whole time I was eating I was thinking to myself, 'God I'm gonna be soooo sick tomorrow' and 'Uhp, guess I'll just go ahead and shove Giardia into my mouth.' I think in the future I should carry a bar of soap around with me, so even if I am using dirty water, at least I'll be killing some of the germs. Anyway, after lunch we got back to celebrating. The afternoon consisted of multiple dance competitions and an award ceremony for the top 3 highest ranked students in all the grades of the Primary and Secondary Schools. I was called up to hand out some of the wards to the students, and I had to pose for many pictures. The dance competition was smaller than I had expected because I had seen a lot more young people dancing at other village events I had gone to. The most fun competition to watch was the young boys competition. They were all so small, but yet they moved so fast! There were also competitions amongst young men, young women and young girls. Most of these I got on video and will try to upload to my facebook so you can see how crazy Malian dance looks. The last event of the day was the soccer game, where new jerseys and soccer balls were presented. Overall it was a really fun and inceredibley exhausting day. the mayor even joked with me at the end that I must be exhausted because I hadn't taken my usual nap, he was right though.
Oh, I forgot to mention that literally the entire day people kept coming up to me and asking me to get up and dance, and everytime I refused. Each time I kind of froze up like a five year old girl wanting to hide behind her mom because she's afraid of the stranger trying to talk to them. I was afraid that they were going to pull me up and make me dance with them. I don't know why I'm so afraid of dancing with them. I think it may be a combination of me not knowing how to dance like them and me not wanting thousands of eyes on me as I make a fool of myself dancing. I have however danced in public like this before, but that has always been with other Tubabs (white people/ Americans). When I'm with at least one other person I feel comfortable, because for me there is comfort in knowing that I'm not the only one who looks like an idiot. Anyway, Joyeux Cinquantenaire Mali!