Morning all,
Work on site continues- as you know we put a halt to concrete placing and are concentrating on stockpiling materials and screening aggregate in preparation for Monday.
We’ve also finished all the laterite placing and compaction.
We bunked off early on Saturday and Ralph Dave and I went the wedding of our driver, Abourahman. He is the guy in the brown suit with his family.
Dave and I got some handmade suits done in the local style. Our surveyor provided us with the hats, and off we went to the wedding.
Some might say we looked pretty bloody sharp. The reaction from the locals was interesting, we’d asked a few people before hand to make sure no offence would be taken and we were assured it would be very well received.
We thought they’d either think it was great that we’d made the effort and would welcome us, or that they’d spend the afternoon taking the piss and laughing at us.
From the minute we arrived and got out of the car, It went down a treat and everyone thought it was brilliant that the 2 whiteys had taken on the local dress. Dress being the operative word, I could have fitted a family of 6 inside mine and still had room for a small dog.
A Muslim wedding is just like a western wedding except that the bride and groom don’t attend the ceremony, there’s no priest or vicar, no food apart from Kola nuts and dates and no excessive quantities of champagne.
It starts with the male friends and relations getting together. The groom stays at his father’s house and the bride stays at her family’s house.
There’s a lot of discussion, (which was the point that we arrived) and this is witnessed by the men, with questions from the bride’s father to the grooms father about things like will he let her pray, will he provide a house, will he get her pregnant, will he not beat her and other important issues.
The grooms father has to agree to all these conditions and then the negotiations over payment from grooms family to that of the bride commence. Once this is done, (an important moment that we missed because we were talking) the men trundle round to the groom’s fathers house for a bit of chatting and general socialising with the groom, who is told that he’s now married.
Someone also goes to the bride and lets her know the good news.
Much later, the brides female friends and family take her to the newly decorated and furnished marital home. A bit after that, the grooms mates and family (still males only of course), take the groom round to the marital home and leave them to it.
The following day, everyone goes to the marital home and hang out together with the men playing cards, talking, drinking tea etc while the women talk, cook, finish the furnishing and decorating.
Obviously all this is interrupted by prayers at the appropriate time.
What with all the excitements of the day, we built up a bit of a thirst and made our exit at an appropriate time to go out for a few beers and dinner.
That’s all for now,
me
