As I wrote in my last post, life in Tanzania for wazungu can be a difficult balancing act at times, particularly if you live in a larger town or city.  Sometimes the pull between the lifestyle you led in the U.S. and the lifestyle more typical of the average Tanzanian can result in feelings of confusion and guilt.  At other times, the desire to mark certain occasions or celebrations in a fashion that feels true to your own traditions has to be negotiated within this new cultural context.  Too often we think about culture as something that other nationalities/ethnicities/people have.  But the truth is that we in the U.S. also have our own cultural practices that mean something to us.  While it’s important to embrace Tanzanian culture while we’re here, to immerse ourselves in new experiences and practices, I know that for myself and for other wazungu friends I have here, there are times during which we feel a strong need to assert our own culture in order to recharge our batteries, so to speak, or simply to mark what would be an important day in our own country.

This need recently arose in a very specific way for a friend of mine.  Jerianne, a missionary from the U.S., was a fellow student at language school in Morogoro.  She lives in Kigoma, which is in the far west of Tanzania, on Lake Malawi (or Lake Nyasa, as it is called here).  In just a little while, Jerianne will be marrying a Tanzanian man by the name of Amani and they plan to live here in Tanzania permanently.  Naturally, given that, her life going forward will look very different from her past life in the U.S. and while I admire the enthusiasm with which she has embraced this, and the, at times and to American eyes, huge compromises she has made, she has acknowledged one thing from back home that she was sad to miss out on… a bachelorette party.   

“A bachelorette party,” you might ask?  “Is that really the kind of American cultural tradition we want to be known for, the kind of cultural celebration that you feel the need to practice overseas?”  But hear me out.  I could get into anthropological theory regarding rites of initiation, liminality, and a lot of other jargon but to boil it down to something I think everyone can understand, bachelorette parties are part of the rite of passage marking the movement of a woman from single status to married.  They are the final celebration of singlehood, and mark the process of saying goodbye in a sense to a specific social status that you often share with your fellow celebrants.  They are often a strange combination of giddy excitement touched with an element of sadness, as your friends recount the things you will no longer be able to do or the upcoming change in your name.  I would argue that traditions like these are every bit as important as those we like to exoticize when we visit other countries.

After a lot of discussion, a couple of friends and I determined that we simply had to give Jerianne a proper send-off into married-womanhood.  Given that this is Tanzania and Jerianne is a missionary (as were several other attendants), we weren’t looking for a drunken booze fest marked by the appearance of a Policeman with tear-away pants.  But we still wanted to celebrate in style.  And this past weekend, we all converged on Morogoro with plans for 24 hours of pool, sun, good food, and maybe even a little dancing.

We had booked a room at the nicest hotel in town.  Shantelle and I went shopping for some decorations and spent about an hour blowing up balloons until we were red in the face.  We bought her the usual American type of gift (i.e. slightly racy), as well as a Tanzanian kanga she could wear for her soon-to-be husband.  As the final touch, we commissioned a cake for her from a local restaurant.  Cakes aren’t common here, so we were particularly excited about this piece and the fact that we could have a message written in icing on the top.  When we showed up to pick up the cake a couple hours later, the woman was quite excited to show it to us because she had taken it upon herself to not only write a congratulatory message on it, but also to press strawberry halves around the edges (berries are a huge luxury here- my friend once paid about $7 for 12 raspberries).  It looked delicious and we had to spend a good five minutes sharing in her excitement.  The last step was to take everything back to the hotel and set it all up before we went to pick up the party participants: Jerianne, Michelle, and Grace.

What followed was a fun evening of great food out on the patio of our hotel, where we watched the sunset and enjoyed live music; dancing did occur.  Shantelle and I were a bit dismayed to find that when they ceremoniously brought out the cake, the heat had caused the chocolate icing to melt and the strawberries (formerly on top of the cake) had now traveled halfway down the sides.  But let’s be honest, since when do a group of girls let something like that stop them from devouring chocolate?  The hoped for sun and pool time did not materialize the next day as planned, but a couple more friends, Ingrid and Santa, joined us for lunch and serenaded Jerianne with an impromptu duet  as a gift, while our fellow diners looked on and wondered why we were interrupting their brunch.  But I thought it was a lovely idea in a place where it can be hard to come up with inventive gift ideas.

It may not have looked and felt exactly like the traditional American bachelorette party, but we were fairly proud of our attempt, and now Jerianne can get married without feeling like she has missed out!