Last week in Tamale

This past week I went back to Yendi and tagged along with Billie and Jessica for a day. They spent the last month or so creating workshops for girls clubs on things like teen pregnancy, personal hygiene, self-esteem and HIV/Aids. They sent letter out to the schools and asked if the clubs were interested in having one for their club. The day I was there we travelled to three different schools and did a workshop on one of the topics at each one. They do the workshops in English and the kids so their schooling in English. But they have a hard time understanding our accents and so often they need to have someone translate either into Dagbani (the local language) or just repeat what they are saying in a familiar accent. One of the schools in particular was impressive for their English comprehension and the girls were very involved and asking good question and participating in the discussion afterwards.
Patrick and I have officially finished our research now so we have been working on our reports for the past few days. The weather has been pretty weird. It rains and then gets sunny and then rain some more. Reminds me of Calgary.
Yesterday a guy that we met was going to a wedding and he invited us to come watch some dancing so Cassey and I went to watch some of it. We felt pretty out of place but weddings are such big events so there were tons of people there. It was a Muslim wedding that lasted for three days. Saturday they were preparing and celebrating. Then Sunday they did their vows in the morning and then while most people were dancing and celebrating, the bride was at home packing up her things. Then last night she was going to officially move into the husbands house. Then today there are the final celebrations. The dancing was really neat. For the first dance there were a bunch of drummers in the middle of a circle of people. All the people had a metal stick and they would dance and alternate hitting sticks with the two people on either side of them. Then for the second dance, the drummers would choose people who had danced in the first circle to come up and dance individually. They would dance and then people would come up and sticks coins to their foreheads (most of which fell to the ground and were picked up by kids). The money then went to the drummers because they do not charge for their musical services. The traditional outfits for the men are the big baggy smocks and when they dance they flail them around in the air. They also have these feather things that each person carries which is supposed to be their spiritual power. They are inscribed differently for each person. From what I understand, the Muslim belief system here is very much a fusion of Islam and traditional local religions. There are mosques all over and they play the call to prayer five times a day, but other than that it is not very obviously Muslim. No women wear veils and Muslims and Christians have no conflict with each other. Some families are half of each.
There was also a political figure in town the other day and apparently campaigning has started for the elections in December so there has been a bunch of trucks driving up and down the street with people playing horns and drums. Between that and the noisy celebrations from the wedding, our neighbourhood has been pretty raucous.
Monday I had a drum lesson with one of the guys who did the drumming and dancing performance for us last month. I’m not an expert by any means, but I think I caught on pretty fast. He taught me a song called Fueme fueme which is a traditional dance from the Accra region. It was fun but my hands got sore. I don’t know how they drum so fast for so long.
So things have been good. Until this morning that is, when Patrick got diagnosed with Malaria. A real downer, but he should be better by the time we leave on Saturday for Kumasi.