Heritage Day

I’ve started to pick up the odd bits of Xhosa, although the clicks are really tricky…for anyone that didn’t know, the language has various different clicks which appear in some words…check it out on YouTube to appreciate the difficulty, haha!

As well as the basic ‘Hello, how are you?’ and ‘Thank You’ I’ve also managed to learn the words for ‘big’ and ‘small’, although the way I found out wasn’t that flattering. One of the children came up behind me, grabbed my bum and shouting ‘Ikhulu’ (big) before proceeding to grab my boobs and shouting ‘Ichici’ (small), haha! But, these two words have actually come in quite useful during lessons when trying to describe things so it’s not all bad news J I seem to have gained a bit more respect from the children, knowing a little bit of Xhosa…definitely the way forward for controlling their behaviour.

So. Heritage day was meant to be on 24^th Sept, but here at Thembelihle we celebrated it a day early. Instead of going to the field after school, we stayed at the home and had our faces decorated with dots, suns, spirals and various other designs, using something similar to Camomile Lotion, applied with matchstick ends and blades of grass, which was really cool. Our lunch was prepared on a stove outside, which tasted…ermm…different ;) The Xhosa bread /dumplings were pretty good, but were covered in the ‘gravy’ from the meat which tasted strange. No idea what animal it was, or what part of the body for that matter! All sorts of unusual shaped pieces of fat and gristle, bleurgh. But I'm sticking to the promise I made to myself that I will try everything this year! Fortunately we have started eating in the main house with the children, where it’s easy to dispose of any unwanted food…the kids love you for leaving food on your plate!!! After lunch, we set up some music and got the drums out, ready for some traditional Xhosa dancing! The kids all put on black and white string skirts and showed off their amazing skills…they’re such amazing dancers! Even though I can’t dance, I couldn’t resist and it seems my Ikhulu Bum is rather useful after all, as Xhosa dancing basically involves making your bum as big as possible and bopping it to the beat…heheheee.