Today was the CCM (political party) event in my village, Kamachumu. I attended as my host mummy begged me to as she was involved in the organisation however I made a point to not show allegiance to the party (as I don't know enough about politics here to have a view) but I went along to see what it was all about. Aside of the veeeeery long veeeery loud speeches (none of which I could understand a word of!) there were lots of performances. Here in Tanzania people perform and the audience show their appreciation by throwing money at the performers. Today's entertainment started with traditional dancing (Haya dancing) which was great to watch and aside of the performers themselves, many of the hundreds of people who were attending the event showed off their dancing skills. I swear that EVERYBODY here knows how to move..... Even the tiny kids right up to the elders in the community dance amazingly well. After the dancing there was a lot of bad singing followed by a rather strange yet intriguing performance by a man who could catch an empty soda bottle on a stick he had in his mouth and then pull lots of stunts without the bottle falling off, he moved onto doing lots of forward and backward rolls through a hoop (which wasn't as impressive) and then for his finale he span a bicycle wheel on various parts of his body! Later a bunch of traditional hunters turned up and to my horror presented the members of parliament with their latest kill, which was a small version of leopard. It was really quite upsetting that the first time I've ever seen a creature like that here it was dead and tied to a pole, but I just decided I should turn away and not look.
Once the event was over the final of the local football tournament started. It took around forty minutes for it to actually start though as there was a major disagreement about one of the teams having two player that they had called in from another team (which of courseisn't allowed) There was so much arguing and numerous times one team or the other would threaten to forfeit and the game and the arguments would all start up again. After lots more arguing the match finally began and there must have been almost 1 thousand spectators if not more. The atmosphere was electric although the match itself was quite rubbish. The end result was 3-1 to the team with the unauthorised players which was a bit of a shame as I really wanted the other team to win!
Haya dancing:
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