I haven’t written in a while because schools are closed, so my work which had really started to get going, has mainly been put on hold until schools resume at the end of January. So most of my time now is taken up with gardening, reading and playing with neighbor kids, while it’s been a lot of fun, it’s not very interesting to write about. So I’ll talk about one of my stranger experiences that happened to me a couple of weeks after arriving to site.
The second Sunday after arriving in my village my host mom and her friend asked me to go to church with them. I thought it would be a great way to meet more of the community, so I agreed. I asked where it was and she pointed to the road beside an abandoned metal shack, which I took to meant that we would need to take a taxi to get there. It turns out that the metal shack, with one small boarded up window, was the church. My host mom and sister then got out capes (not cloak-like capes, but super-hero-style capes) and puffy chef hats with crosses on them, and put them on. It was pretty strange. My host mom said it was a “universalist” Christian church, which sounded pretty broad, probably with a wide scope of followers. But at the point when my host family put on their capes and puffy hats, I started to become skeptical.
When we entered the metal shack, the room was almost completely dark except for one candle in the middle of the dirt floor and many people standing along the walls singing and wearing the same capes and hats. It didn’t feel like any church I had ever been to. Once the singing started back up, someone from the crowd started running in circles around the candle, their cape flying behind them. They were joined by a couple of other people running around the candle. My experience just kept getting stranger and stranger.
For the two hours I was there almost everyone ran around the candle. The point seemed to be to get really dizzy and stumble back to your spot on the wall. A couple of times a person got so dizzy they fainted, which got the whole room really excited. The man that was wearing a special leopard cape and hat seemed to be in charge, and when someone fainted he would put his cape over their head and blow whistles in their ears until they were revived. One girl that was not revived by this was taken outside, while people continued to run in circles around the candle.
Sometimes they would splatter water around the candle. I believe this was symbolically asking for rain. And they once read from a book – I assume the Bible – in Sesotho. It was the only Christian tradition that I was familiar with that occurred while I was in the church. When I got too hot and tried from standing (and weirded out) I left with my host sister. The service, with everyone standing, singing and running around the candle lasted five hours. It felt much more like traditional African beliefs and religious practices, with a bit of Bible and Christianity thrown in. Everyone seemed to really enjoy it, although it did not bring rain for another month and a half. I want to go back, but it has taken several months for me to recover from my initial culture/church-shock to really want to go back. In a country that has lost so many of its cultural traditions to modernization it was encouraging to see some still thriving.
