Celebrations in Nyala

Day three in Darfur started off with a wedding celebration. Like most African cultures wedding ceremonies are a series of celebrations. Today I was able to take part in a ‘breakfast’ to celebrate the upcoming wedding of two of our staff members. The funniest part is that both of them are out in the field doing food distributions but that doesn’t stop the rest of their family and friends from celebrating. So we arrived and I experienced the first bit of culture shock of living in a muslim culture. I started to follow the guys that were with us to greet the men that were standing around and I was quickly stopped and told that I must walk around a different way and enter the women’s area. Oops! My world of men and women being treated relatively the same are over.

So we had to walk all the way around a sheltered area where the men sat on mats eating and talking and entered the area where the women and children sat. But even there we didn’t fit and we were escorted into a little hut where we sat and waited for people to come in and greet us there. Shortly after we arrived a large platter of bread and other dishes were brought for us to eat. So we removed our shoes, sat on mats and dug into the food using only our right hand. It’s quite an art to tear off a piece of bread and use it to scoop up the various sauces and only using one hand to accomplish the task. But we seemed to be able to make a significant dent in the pile of food.

After the trays were ushered away and hands were washed the little hut slowly filled with women some carrying traditional drums. The drumming started and our role was to clap along. The women all joined in singing and some danced. The bride’s mother joined us with a bottle of perfume and sprayed it throughout the hut. I guess this is supposed to make us all happy. She danced around waving a colorful cloth singing and spraying perfume. I could have sat there all day listening to them sing but I could have done without the cheep perfume.

All I could think about as I sat on this rickety bed in the middle of a small mud hut amongst beautiful Sudanese women singing and dancing was how God has blessed me. Just to be able to sit and celebrate with women who are in the center of a war zone and have experienced pain that I can not even comprehend is something I never want to take for granted. Last night I joined a security meeting that the UN holds twice a week for NGO’s and I heard about the movement of the rebel groups, which villages had been attacked and which roads are not safe to travel on and yet the next morning I am celebrating a marriage. Life continues here even with the horrors that surround them. God’s grace is real.