I went to mass on Christmas Eve. On Christian holidays the services are longer and there are a lot more of them; the one on December 24th is a retelling of Christ’s birth. The ceremony is something like a Greek drama, where acted scenes are broken up by soliloquies and choral interludes; also like Greek plays, the audience knows the plot and the ritual serves only as a reminder. A big electric star was placed over the church, and when Jesus was born the star shone and the crowd went wild. That night I ate with my foreign neighbors and their guests, eight people hailing from five countries. The food was eclectic but very good.
I didn’t do much on Christmas day. The teachers are drawn from across the country, thus they don’t have networks of extended family here and don’t do much in the way of celebrating holidays. I went to see my students while they were eating; they were somewhat depressed, unhappy with their food and wanted to be at home. Afterwards I visited my mkuu’s (headmaster)’s house, ate pilau and watched terrible Christmas music videos with a few of the local bigshots. Then I dropped by my neighbor’s house but had already missed dinner – only Cleophas, the father, was present, watching Tanzanian soap operas. He tried to explaining the plot to me, and I gathered there was a pregnant woman who could not get an abortion, but all the other details escaped me.
In Ndalat, my home in Kenya, the locals would drink a lot – what’s a holiday without drinking? – and climb the hills which marked the village, from where they could see a good section of Africa’s Great Rift Valley. Presumably they went to church as well.
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