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| Gotta look your best for Dia de Murrupula! This little boy was just too cute is his a-little-too-big-for-him suit. |
In the US we have county and city fairs complete
with crazy fried foods, cheap carnival rides, games, and performances. In
Mozambique, every town has one day a year where they celebrate their founding. This August 17th, Murrupula
celebrated its 54th year , decorating the town’s main street with
green and yellow painted banners stating “Viva Murrupula”, “Viva a Educação”
and “Murrupula combate a pobreza pelo progresso da sociedade!”
Like every holiday, the day begins with a parade
into town along the main road, people clapping and singing, students holding
banners representing their school, the “chefes” and administrators leading the
way to the town’s roundabout where everyone gathers for the more formal
ceremony of laying flowers on the independence plaque. Then everyone heads to the nearby stage painted
in the red, yellow, green and black coloring of the Mozambican flag where they
watch performances by local cultural groups.
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| Kids climbing in the trees to get a good view of the stage |
Differing from other holidays, Dia de Murrupula is
a much grander celebration. People came from
neighboring cities and even neighboring provinces to celebrate. And this year was an even more exciting
celebration; the country’s famous television program Concerto em Moçambique would be filming here! Students, teachers, and administrators had excitedly
been talking about this event for months, much to my ignorant ears of the
importance of the appearance of this artist or that singer I had never heard
of. However, during the celebrations of
the day, it quickly became apparent how special this event was for my little
village.
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| Me, Adrienne, Merina and Esperanca |
Adrienne and I went out in the morning to watch
the dancing, cheering on some of our musically inclined students and ignoring
stares from visitors who were not used to seeing two white girls walking around
town. A man with surprisingly good English
told us how welcome we were and how happy he was we were here. We brushed him off, ignoring him and thinking
‘ugh, another crazy guy trying to speak English with us’. Later, when he
appeared on stage and the crowd cheered excitedly, we quickly learned that he
was a famous Mozambican Mecua singer, haha ooops.
At some point in the afternoon, there were bicycle
and sack races (still not entirely sure where or when this actually happened), and
hundreds of people gathered in the field in the 20-30 newly constructed make-shift
barracas (bars) set up just for this special day. After Adrienne complemented a well-dressed
woman, “chique” as we call it, with her colorful capulana attire and face decorated
with paint made from a local plant, she graciously offered to paint our
faces. Adrienne and I both agreed, minus
the carnival rides and games, this was exactly like an American fair. |
| Getting my face painted by this nice woman |
But the true highlight of the day was to come in
the evening, the big espectáculo everyone had been talking about. Scheduled to start at 4pm, we headed over to
the field around 5:30pm (we have learned to adjust for “African time”) to where
they had constructed a big stage with lots of speakers stacked 6-7 feet high. There were well over 1,000 people there, all
clearly having been celebrating the entire day. We chose to stand on the periphery of the
crowd and an American woman approached us.
Turns out she, along with her Mozambican husband, runs an orphanage in
Nampula city and strangely enough, some of her family is from Fullerton, a city
about 10 minutes away from my hometown.
Small world!
We stayed until about 8pm (our usual bedtime),
enjoying chatting with our new American friend, dancing with children and
watching the crowds excitement. We
decided it was time to go when the power went out for the second time and a
drunk teenager ran by with a flaming aerosol can.
Despite a couple power outages, the performances continued
throughout the entire night, the cheers and bass audible even from our house located
5-10 minutes away from the field. The
town is a little slower this morning, but we were still woken up early to our
neighbor’s music blasting, a signal that Sunday the party continues!
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| I know you're not supposed to have favorites, but these two are definitely my favorites - Fatiminha and Merina |
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