Hey Guys,

As you can see, I am getting worse and worse at this. In my defense I was outside of Lusaka for a week and I couldn’t get on the Internet. I will try to go through and brief everyone on what I have been doing.

First I promised I would describe the Kitchen party. When a couple gets engaged, the girl has to then start something like marriage classes from respected women in her family, usually aunts. These aunts spend at least 2 months showing her how to cook, how to clean, how to keep the house for her husband, and yes how to please him in bed. I am told there is a special dance that must be done before, which I would like to see but obviously not in context. At the end of these two months, the couple throws a kitchen party for the women who know them.

A kitchen party is like a mix of the Canadian wedding shower and Female stag party. The kitchen party is scheduled to start at 1 PM. However as with everything else in Zambia, the only thing you can rely on is that nothing goes to plan. The kitchen party I went to started at about 14:30. All the guests sit around waiting for the girls group to arrive. This group is composed of the girl and her teachers under a cloth, surrounded by all the females in her family. The master of ceremonies leads them. The MC is a woman who has no hip bones and is instead held together by elastic bands. I say this because she can shake her booty like nobodies business. And she does it all with a whistle making all kinds of noise. So the MC leads the girls group onto the stage where they all sit down, the girl and her teachers still covered by a cloth.

A prelude ensues where more elastic hip shaking takes place to drumming and singing. Here I would like to say that by this time some of the ladies (loose term possibly in some cases) are getting quite sloshed. Some of them randomly jump on the stage and start dancing. Some of them just make lots of noise in their seats. At the kitchen party I was at 90% of the crowd was quite well behaved but I definitely got some booty shakin in my face with someone yelling “Mozungu, watch me dance”.

Next after much delay, the man’s group comes. There are 2 men surrounded by his family members bringing a big basket of fruit to symbolize that the family will be fruitful. For me this part was confusing because the main man is walking and then there is this other guy who is not really explained. After some clarification I found that the main man is the best friend to the groom and the groom is supposed to walk behind quietly unnoticed. This is done from what I can understand so that the eligible ladies in the crowd don’t get interested in the groom but are sort of distracted by the friend. The groom then gets on the stage where he takes the sheet off the bride and her teachers. I couldn’t see the entire process because his whole family was helping but something happened. Then he sits down across the stage. The bride is taken by the MC and kneels in front of her husband to be and sort of flops to one side. She sits back up straight and promptly flops to the other side. She gets up and the groom kisses her on the cheek. The MC who is jiggling profusely and whistling away gets them both up and leads them down a walkway. At the end the groom keeps going and the bride turns around and heads back to her spot. Now the whole time the girl is with her head lowered and humble. This is because her future mother in law is present and she has to look like a humble and quiet woman.

The MC starts opening presents now and at every present the giver has to come up and dance while the present is being shown. Thankfully, I was never called up because my hipbones are still intact and my booty shaking is not up to par. This goes on for a long time with random interludes of eating and a mother and mother in law thanking ceremony similar to the husband part. After all this, the party starts to liven up in some areas as the women drink more, and disperse in others where the women choose not to be associated with such nonsense. By nonsense I mean, there are stories of women who start dancing without clothes and similar cultural taboo occurrences.

While I thought I would put other things in this email, I apparently have written too much already. Therefore everything else will have to come later.

SJ