Crash Goes the Wedding

Today’s adventure: wedding crashing. I’m getting good at this crashing thing. (It wasn’t true crashing because the relatives said I could come.) As I anticipated the event, I thought, I wonder if God put something in me that He didn’t put in everyone else. Because I was excited about going to the celebration without the friend who introduced me to the ladies I was going with. Going to a wedding of someone I don’t know with someones I don’t know to interact with a lot of people who don’t speak my language. Bring it on!

I had morning coffee and dates with the lady who was taking me. Her daughter looked at my family pictures and assured me that I look better with a headscarf on than without. Then we drove a few hundred yards down the road to the village where the wedding was. Lots of ladies, lots of greetings, lots of food. It wasn’t quite a wedding in the sense that we know one. It was more an open house all day for the bride, but it’s part of the multi-day wedding festivities.

Fortunately, I was there for morning coffee time, and typical coffee time fare is dates, bananas, oranges, apples, and pears. Hard to go wrong there, unless you go too heavy on the dates. Oh, except the local sweet, which is very nice but could be pure lard. I still haven’t figured that out, so I’ll go light on that, too.

If I didn’t know better, I might have wondered if the groom’s mother were drunk. She wasn’t, of course, but she was very, very happy. She was leaping around and pretending to hit people with a stick and whooping and singing and dancing. (Hmmm, my mother could probably understand.) It made me happy to see her so happy. Oh yeah, weddings are joyful occasions! Abandoned happiness is appropriate for such a time. The dancing also accentuated the joy. The happiness throbbed through the pulse of the rhythm.

I sat and watched a lot and talked a little. Most of the ladies didn’t speak to me, probably because they assumed that I couldn’t speak their language and because they knew they couldn’t speak mine. I did speak to a few. Many asked about me, and I could hear the ladies who knew me explain over and over that I was a friend of their neighbor’s who couldn’t be there today.

They wanted to take my picture, with the groom’s female relatives, then with the groom and his female relatives, then with the bride and more relatives. I could only catch that they thought my eyes were beautiful. Ah, a celebrity because of my eyes. I cooperated and thanked them for the honor.

One of the girls slipped me away to tour the neighborhood and go to her house for a few minutes. The relatives insisted that I stay to eat lunch with them, so we were killing time until lunch was ready.

Lunch was delicious, and a new friend showed me how to ball up the rice and chicken and get it in my mouth without spilling it all over me. The trick is lifting it up to my mouth instead of up over my mouth. I’m used to eating with my hand, but I’m not used to eating with my hand without bread to scoop up the rice!

I left after lunch, and they sent me away with a meal for my friend who couldn’t make it, and a Pepsi for me.