I was excited to attend the wedding of two of my close friends, fellow PCVs, in the village this weekend. It was for my friends Kevin, an Education volunteer in my intake, and Arianna, a Health volunteer in the intake following mine. Many volunteers from Eastern Province and even a few from other provinces made it to Kevin’s village to attend the wedding.
We gathered in Petauke and all piled into a canter truck on the Great East Road. This spectacle is usually for funerals, weddings, and ceremonies to get a large group of people from point A to point B; so as we traveled into the bush with almost 30 white people in the back of a truck, we generated a lot of attention just going the 25k down the road to Kevin’s village where the wedding was being held.
Kevin & Arianna were eagerly awaiting our arrival, they had started the wedding festivities with his villagers the day before. He lives in a village of 700 people and there are a lot of villages nearby, so there was quite a crowd there before we even arrived.
The amayis (women) were hard at work preparing to feed us lunch when we arrived. There were 6 drums of thobwa (a fermented porridge type drink served at weddings.) Arianna’s parents in America paid for a cow to be slaughtered and Kevin’s paid for the cost of a number of chickens to be prepared. For lunch we had chicken, rice and cabbage and dinner was nsima, beef, and cabbage.
Kevin’s compound has a fence around it so we set up our tents in the backyard and all dressed in proper wedding attire. We ate lunch, and as just as the heat was getting more unbearable a few clouds opened up and released some refreshing showers on us. In America, one might say that overcast skies and a few showers may ruin a wedding, but it made the climate so much more tolerable for us and it only postponed the festivities for about an hour.
After the showers faded away the womens and girls choirs came onto the compound and people gathered around as we prepared for the procession the the arena they had prepared for the wedding festivities. Kevin & Arianna came out of the house covered in a chitenge escorted by a man and a woman (in a traditional zam-wedding it would have familial significance.) There were about 3 long reed mats that were laid out in the fashion of a red carpet and as they were escorted by the singing choirs, drumming, and cheers of their friends some women kept bringing the reed mats forward.
The bride and groom are supposed to have a very solemn appearance on their wedding day, especially the bride as it signifies her sadness of leaving her family. Kevin & Arianna, tried, but sometimes they just couldn’t hold it back and were both beaming…it didnt help that we were edging them on.
Once they finally reached the arena there was a whole agenda of events. Speeches by the chief (Kevin lives close to his palace, so he was an honored guest,) Arianna’s headman had come and gave a speech as well, Emily gave a speech on behalf of the volunteers…which they asked us all to come up and introduce ourselves and which part of Zambia we were living in. There was a woman’s group dance, the girl’s choir, and even a modern dance performance. The presenting of gifts also took a long time. They had asked not to be given gifts, but some were given all the same, the money they were given is going to be made into a girl’s scholarship at Kevin’s school.
The procession back to the compound was much shorter than the opening procession and we were all happy for our delicious dinner and we spent the rest of the night hanging out and dancing with the iwes. The sun came back out just in time for us to watch it set, and the sunset after the rains is one of my favorite ways to end a day in Africa, it was perfect. It was a lovely occasion as well as a beautiful collision of two cultures coming together over a common celebration that we share.