Let Them Entertain Me

The ending of the first term brings the girls a lot of free time. Normally during the day they just sit around or watch movies, or even debate. Then the entertainment chief organized two special entertainment events.
On Saturday afternoon/night was the first event. It started at 4.30, then we had a break for dinner at 6, and then it started back up at 7.30ish. So what was the event you ask, well it was a combination of a lot of things. They had a few groups do some dancing and then they had another top model competition. Once again it was fierce. In this competition there were girls of all ages involved. Then inbetween rounds, when the girls were changing, they played jeapardy. I have used this game in my class as a fun review activity. I alter the rules a bit so it can work with 30+ people. Before they played they had me come up and introduce the game. I should mention that the entertainment chief is one of the students that I teach. I think that jeapardy went okay. Since they only had 4 girls playing and then about 500 watching I believe it got a little boring for the crowd, but it made me happy that they tried it. They even did double jeapardy and final jeapardy..haha.. love it.
The second big entertainment event was Wednesday night. It started at 8 and went to 11. This was the closing event of the term. Different clubs and organizations at the school performed. They sang songs, did traditional dancing, hip-hop, and skits. The event ended with a boom--for those of you who don't know, evidentally boom is the english word for a dance..ah. wonder how I missed that one when I learned english..
Honestly it was really fun, and I am SO happy that I was invited and that I went. I would like to note that I was the only teacher invited. Just to give you an idea of how it was for me I will tell you about two of the skits that were performed. One was done by the club Fight Against Aids. Actually I am going to talk about the demostration that they did first. They had about 10 girls from the club stand in a straight line with hands behind their backs. The president of the club gave one girl a stone and the girls passed it amongst themselves. After a certain amount of time they called girls out of the audience to guess which girl had the stone. This was done about 4 times, obviously each time the girl could not guess correctly. Well you might ask what was the point of this, it was to remind the girls that one cannot always see who has HIV/AIDS..(at least this is my guess, it was all in kinyarwanda). The club then did a skit about a group of friends and how a girl borrrowed a sweater from another girl and then a third girl freaks out at her friend for wearing a sweater that someone with HIV was wearing since of course one can get HIV that way.. After the skit the president of the club then outlined the ways it IS transmitted, and ways that it is NOT transmitted (I was told this happened, of course I did not understand what they said). The other skit was about women equality and how cultural/society treats or views women here. Overall they were nice breaks amongst the dancing and singing.
Now the boom. Ha. First of all the girls all wanted to make sure that I was staying to dance, and I did. But for the first 15 minutes the girls would barely dance 'with' me, rather if I started dancing they would all stop dancing and make a circle around me so they could all watch. Lets be real, I'm not THAT good of a dancer for that..haha.. Luckily the entertainment cheif solved the problem and turned the lights off in the dining hall. This helped a bit.. eventually the girls just separated to dance with themselves, which was fine with me. I stayed with a group of about 15 girls and danced. It was fun, essentialy I made a fool of myself, but hey that is what dancing is all about, right?
Some of the girls tried to teach me to dance like the do, but since half of them could be amateur belly dancers, I, of course could not follow along. I tried to explain to them that I don't know how to make my stomach/hips move like that and all they could say was why not? haha.. how cute.
I had wanted to hook my ipod up to their radio so they could listen to some other music than the 3 CDs they have, but I failed to hook it up, over break I am going to try an buy the cassette that you plug your ipod in to then play it in a radio, because I know come term two the girls would love to listen to my music..haha..
And to finish this off I would like to say I think I have a 'new' favorite song. Many of you might know about my obsession with Toto Africa, or rather my brother singing the song and being the musical instruments, well the girls have a remix version of the song with African drum beats in the background. It is amazing, I love it. I must find a way to bring it home. :)

oh wait one more thing, I introduced the running man and the cabbage patch to the girls; they could not stop laughing.