My Gap Year and Other Animals: August 2013

On the last Saturday in July, Tses was host to our constituency’s annual culture festival. Groups from Berseba, Vaalgras, (you might have to get Google Maps up to help at this point) and even as far as Bethanie came to compete. Participants performed traditional dances and plays from their tribes, and competed to advance to the regional competition later on in the year. The performances were just fantastic – from the youngest groups to the eldest competitors, they seemed exceptionally proud to be representing their villages and certainly performed with great skill and diligence. As hosts, it was great to see both the community and the schools turn out to show their support for the event. The secondary school’s Oshiwambo culture group were phenomenal, and all of Nowak’s female staff had matching Nama dresses made for the occasion. Although I’ve never worn anything like it, and it is a somewhat unusual patchwork contraption with a super-skinny waist and a positively enormous skirt, everyone was very impressed with our efforts and it is a dress that will forever remind me of our time here.

The weekend was an explosion of colour, music, singing, food, dancing, and of course, plenty of time for a party. There was a dance in the community hall the night before the main event (supervised by Nampol Special Forces - how bad did they expect my dancing to be?!). Despite having no idea what the done thing is at these events, or entirely what we were supposed to do, my Namastap credentials received nods of approval, several looks of sheer surprise and even received a sort-of compliment: “Ah miss, you dance like an old person!”. Eh, thanks.

My dancing bore little to no resemblance to this. Oh dear.

For the first time ever, I will make an attempt to abide by the old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” and simply show you some of the better pictures from the weekend - making this possibly the longest blog post known to Internet-kind at 15,325 words!