There are some things I’ll never understand here…

My next-door neighbor is a nice guy and a very nice neighbor.  We don’t have problems and he’s always very courteous.  Shortly after he moved in he introduced me to his girlfriend, and after a while I noticed that she seemed to be growing bigger in the mid-section.  (Here, sadly, that’s not uncommon before marriage.)  She stayed here for a while, I think, but then when the baby was born she went back to her mom’s house for her mom to help out with the baby.  Now the baby is about 7 or 8 months old, and last month my neighbor told me that they were preparing the wedding.  He said that the official wedding would be a certain day in a town a few hours from here, but then there would be a reception here in our town a week and a half after that. 

When I told that to some friends here, they asked if my neighbor, the groom, would be going to the wedding.  Um, he’s the groom!  Of course!  Or at least that’s what I had assumed, though I realized that that wasn’t a given here.  So the next time I saw him, I asked if he’d be going to his own wedding.  “Nah,” was the reply.  “I have a few brothers who will go and take care of that for me.”  There are some things I’ll never understand here.

Anyway, the day of the wedding passed uneventfully and the day of the reception drew near.  Here, it just means that you go and eat, and if you’re there in the evening there may be dancing.  But I knew that I wouldn’t know many people there, so that it would be quite boring to just sit by myself until they served me food, I ate, and I could get up and leave.  So I invited a friend to join me at the wedding.  (Yes, that is one of the things I’ve understood here – you can always bring someone else with you to such a festivity and they won’t bat an eye at feeding your friends, too!)  The friend I invited was my host sister from the village, who is a horrible conversationalist – it’s usually awkward sitting and trying to chat with her.  So I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone – spend time with my sometimes awkward host sister and spend time at the semi-awkward wedding reception.  I picked her up and we went to the wedding reception.  We got food, several sodas a piece, some juice, etc.  All in all, a fine time. 

When we were ready to leave, I told her that I wanted to go and visit someone else (another of My People) before taking her home, since we were just a few blocks from her house.  (Yes, that is one of the things I’ve understood here – you can also just stop in and visit people, and you can bring others with you.  You can also add things to other people’s plans without necessarily telling them in advance.)  I showed my host sister a picture of the lady we were going to go visit, and she said that she didn’t know her.

When we got there, we found the lady we were going to visit.  And we found that she also had a house guest.  The surprise was that it was the younger sister of the host sister who was with me that day!  She had earlier kind of eloped and ran away (which is a big no-no here), but had since moved back to the village, pregnant, with her husband-ish.  Now the baby was maybe 5 months old, and she was staying with this lady for a few weeks.  The lady explained that her husband-ish had stayed at their house to go to school for a year or two, so that must be why she ended up there.  It was weird, though, that her sister didn’t even know she was in town, and she didn’t try to find her sister and greet her while she was here.  But what was even more weird was the fact that even though they hadn’t seen each other for a long time, they barely said more than hi to each other.  The lady we were visiting played on her phone, I tried to make conversation, and the others just sat there, mainly.  There are some things I’ll never understand here. . .

Well, there are plenty of other things that I don’t think I’ll ever understand, but this post is already too long, so I’ll stop here.  Thanks for your prayers!