June 26

So this weekend I went to a graduation party thing. That shebang was as well-attended as our wedding (although the open bar and killing band were lamentably absent). Mostly what it consists of is a series of speeches. Every bloody person who has ever had any influence on the graduate's education gets up to speak, and they all flap their jaws for at least five minutes apiece, so you can expect the average graduation party to take about four to five hours. No shit. There's even a Master of Ceremonies to organize all this, and the DJ plays recordings of dodgy Ugandan keyboard favorites (How Great Thou Art on a Yamaha Plastinette organ was my personal favorite) in between speeches. Oh, and if the people are really special, they might get to dance their gift straight up the aisle (yes, the people are separated into two tents so that there can be a processional of the graduate at the beginning . . . more on that later) to give it to the lucky graduate. The whole time I'm thinking how mortified I'm going to be if they make me drag my gift up in this unfortunate manner. I didn't end up having to do so, but the people who did got super creative by pretending to give the gift to other people along the way. *Psyche!* Wow. Really.

After a few hundred speeches, there's a gigantic feast. Since people don't traditionally eat with silverware here, meals are generally very quiet. When you've been listening to speech after speech in a language you only sort of understand, that's REAL quiet. After everyone has had a chance to clean their hands and use the "short call," the graduate gets up to say something. (Note: "short call" is the term if it's #1, but at this type of location, you only hope you don't have a "long call," because it's basically like target practice in an outhouse where the hole in the floor is about 4x6 inches. You gotta be spot on and right flexible not to mess that up, and you have the added pressure of knowing that if you have a poopstain when you come out, 200 guests are going to see it before you smear a white plastic lawn chair with your own mess. So trust me when I say that you want to get your business done in the morning before you leave the house). Anyway, the graduate thanks everybody for coming and for not letting her mess up her life in some irreperable way--I'm making this part up because I only understood the thanking people for coming part--for about a half hour (not exaggerating). Then people are invited to bring up their gifts. There's a table set up in the middle of the "aisle" where people form a queue. Each person takes about five minutes to congratulate the graduate, so that whole deal takes at least a half hour, too.

After all that, the graduate's parents get up to speak. Since this particular woman's father had died, it was kind of a sad moment, but a shorter moment nonetheless. But alas, her mother was about 197 years old, and could not speak any louder than a whisper. At this point, everyone revved up their own conversations. I took this to be particularly rude, but neither anyone near the speaker, nor the speaker herself, seemed to care. Interesting. After her speech, the pastor got up to summarize (he was good, that only took thirty seconds after about a ten-minute oration) and pray to bless the whole convention before dismissal. Wow. That took for friggin' ever. Oh, I almost forgot . . . the cake was the last thing. It was a huge deal, like a newly wed couple cutting their cake, but without the mess all over each other. I say each other, because the graduate hires a stooge to stand in robes next to her and just be a fellow "graduate." Often this person is actually a classmate if the party is nearer to the date of graduation, but this dude was just a stooge. Koo-koo!

That's that. I've not been brief because it wasn't a brief gathering, but it was certainly interesting. The whole thing took about 5-51/2 hours. Sometime when I have more energy, I'll tell you how the rest of the evening went.