My last few days in the Gambia were packed with excitement, including a few more kora lessons, a fascinating school theater performance that Ibraheem was judging, and the opening ceremony of a national youth conference that Ibraheem was running, complete with the Vice President of the Gambia.
The first photo is of one of the acts in the school theater performance -- a traditional Indian dance, performed by a couple of students of Indian descent and a couple native Gambians. I hope I have time to write a whole blog post on the entire event, as it certainly deserves it, but this act in particular stuck out in my mind. The girl on the left in the picture was the leader of the group, and while the other dancers sometimes stumbled through the choreography, she had a look of intense focus the whole time (and it was long -- like maybe 4-5 min). The audience of middle and high school students, who you can see a few of at the bottom the picture, were going absolutely wild the whole time, screaming and dancing and clapping along. And I just had this sense that for this young girl, living in a country and going to a school where she's in a tiny minority ethnically and culturally (and probably religiously, though she could be Muslim), this was a pivotal moment in her adolescent years, the kind of moment of feeling accepted and even celebrated that problably doesn't come along very often. I felt a real
sense of vicarious pride and joy in her accomplishment!The second picture is from the opening ceremonies of the youth conference -- part of a procession of youth groups, musicians, traditional dancers, and more passing by a dais with several ministers and the Vice President. The brown hairy guy dancers you can see in this picture are monsters who carry machetes, and they're acting out some sort of attack scene. It's supposed to be very bad luck if they touch you with their machetes, and Sirah tells me that Rugi used to be very frightened of them as a child.
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