Kpendua: A Welcome Fit for Royalty!

Upon our arrival in Kpendua (pronounced "pend-u-a"--"K" is silent), Mumuni Zakaria, the community's former assemblyman, met us at the "station." (Everyone called it the station because it's where the bus stops, but there's not actually a station of any sort.) He and another man tied our backpacks to the back of bikes and rolled them along as they walked us to the clinic, where we would be staying. Along this walk, everyone wondered who we were-- the adults looked at us with curiosity, as Kpendua doesn't get many visitors, and the kids yelled a mixture of "silaminga, silaminga!" ("white person" in Dagbani, the local language in the Northern Region), "N-gang Nguni, N-gang Nguni!" (my friend, Cheri's local name--she spent two years there as a Peace Corps volunteer and, though she finished over two years ago, was kind enough to connect us with the village), and "Jisonaa, Jisonaa!" (the local name of the last Peace Corps volunteer, Connor, who left only a few weeks ago). The children were convinced we were Cheri and Connor at first, and though the calls of "N-gang Nguni" and "Jisonaa" subsided a bit as the days went on, people (adults and children both) insisted that we looked just like them. (Cheri has straight blonde hair.)

After putting our stuff down, we began our greetings. See the next post for more on greetings...

After greetings, Zakaria said we should rest so we began settling into our room (a room in the clinic building--one of only a few concrete buildings in Kpendua--where Connor had lived during his stay in the village; you can see some of it in the photo of me drinking tea below). As we were relaxing, we heard stirring outside of our door. About 6 women, including Queen Mother (whom we had already greeted), and numerous children were outside, so we welcomed them into our room. With them, they brought a bucket of unknown items. They put it down, but we couldn't see anything...and since we spoke no Dagbani and they spoke no English, it just sat there and we sat and smiled a lot at each other. After a few minutes of semi-awkward smiling, I got out some tissue paper I had brought and taught a few kids how to make a tissue paper flower. Both the women and children were excited by this. About 10 minutes in (still not knowing what's in the bucket, if we were supposed to unpack it, or if it was even for us), Mumuni Zakaria came and informed us that Queen Mother and her company had come to welcome us with tea, at which point we were left alone to drink our tea and told that Queen Mother and her company want to do the Tora dance to welcome us when we are done with tea.

The tea was our first of many encounters with the very large portions we were given in Kpendua! Between the two of us, we had a large pot of hot tea to drink, complete with milk and sugar, and an entire loaf of bread! Besides the fact it was very hot outside and drinking hot tea seemed absurd to us, the sheer amount was so much! But it was such a nice welcoming gesture. More on portions in a future post...

After we did what we could to make a dent in the tea and bread, we started to hear drumming across the road. We headed over there, where people had started to gather. The drummers led a large group of both adults and children over to the area near the sub-chiefs house, drumming the whole way. While the people gathered, Mumuni Zakaria took us to greet the sub-chief. When we returned, there was quite the gathering--probably about 75 people! A group of 10-15 women danced the Tora dance, something I pictured as a short dance with a few people. Instead, this was a large gathering, and the dancing went on for 45 minutes or so! It was clear from this dance how fortunate and unique this community is--everyone was having a blast, dancing, laughing, watching, and welcoming two strangers into their community. The drummers accompanied the dance, which took place in a moving circle and after some probably basic (but seemed fancy to me) footwork, two women would bump butts, before returning to the outer part of the circle. They even invited me to join in, so I did...and in true Amy/Ms. Gale-form, I stumbled my way through it but had fun doing trying (& everyone REALLY enjoyed watching the silaminga try the dance!) There are photos, below, but the video captures it best. The app won't let me upload video on iPad, so hopefully I can add it from home in the next several days once I'm at a computer.

The welcome was so overwhelmingly warm and kind. We did not expect any sort of formal welcome outside of our greeting the chief, so the tea, dancing, drumming and huge gathering in our honor was beyond anything we could've imagined. It was hard to believe that all the effort was for us, just because we had come to visit the village! The tremendous kindness continued throughout our entire stay, but I'll continue with more tomorrow...