an Afternoon with African teenagers

If you ever invite a group of teenage Central Africa girls over to your house be sure to have plenty of chocolate, hair bands, thread for friendship bracelets, and body wash on hand.

The past couple Monday afternoons Caitlin and I have had a few girls from the sewing class over to our house. Yesterday we had a group of five girls over: Petula, another Petula (it’s a popular name here), Wiliame, Audrey, and Nadia. It was fun and definitely an interesting clash of cultures.

First on the list of things to do when the girls arrived was to take a grand tour of our house. Our house isn’t very big but compared to where they all live it’s probably pretty nice and we have indoor plumbing! The bathroom is always an attraction. We’ve had to teach several girls how to flush our toilet. Next we hit up the chocolate: homemade brownies from Heidi! The girls laugh about how Americans love chocolate so much but I’m pretty sure they love it just as much. How can you help it?

Williame doing my hair!

Next they decided it was time to do mine and Caitlin’s hair African style: lots of little braids! Of course, we didn’t have the special rubber bands for our hair so we had to take a trip to the market to buy some. I’m sure we looked funny, five African girls and two white girls, laughing, talking in Sango, skipping and singing all the way to the market. We got what we needed plus some bread because we had to have something to put our nutella on (the brownies weren't enough to satisfy the girls' chocolate cravings).

The rest of the afternoon was spent hair braiding, making friendship bracelets, wandering around the house cleaning, and taking showers. Yeah I said showers. While I was out having my Sango lesson and Caitlin’s head was getting braided, some of the girls decided they wanted to try out our shower. By the time they’d started there wasn’t much we could do about it and by the time they left our whole house smelled like body wash and our bathroom was covered in water. Those girls were very clean and full of chocolate by the time we sent them home and Caitlin and I looked a little bit more Africa with our hair all braided up. It was a good time.


p.s. David- the friendship bracelet you gave me before I left for Africa has started a new fad among the orphans. They all want to learn how to make bracelets just like mine... especially the boys because I told them you made mine.