My Arranged Marriage

I had a marriage feast once. I've never been married, of course. But the celebration, oh yes. I spent a semester of college in Namibia, and throughout the semester we had three homestays with families. Two of the homestays were in urban areas, and one of them was with a rural family in the northern portion of the country, about 50 miles from the border of Angola. In other words, all of the homestays were awesome, the rural being one of the best.

For our first homestay we were paired with another student, but the other two were solo affairs. A lot of the host families lived near each other, however, so it was common to see one of your American friends during your ten days as an adopted child. This could be comforting as well as fun. Our host families were excellent and welcoming, but it can nonetheless be exhausting to spend 24 hours a day with companions who may not speak a great amount of English nor share your cultural background.

I will note that just about every man I met in Namibia knew of and loved Celine Dion, and this made me feel right at home and extremely appreciative of Namibians.

I spent my semester with 19 fantastic Americans, but I was extra blessed to be very close with two of them before we ever arrived in the wonderful continent to our East. My friend Samantha and I had been extremely close since our first week of college, and Dan and I had bonded quite a bit our sophomore year. Dan and I further cemented our friendship during our flight from the States (http://thedaileebailey.blogspot.com/2009/11/amelia.html), and then had another opportunity to bond during our rural homestays.

Dan's host family was very close with my host family, so I ended up seeing Dan almost every day during our ten-day adventure. Almost immediately when our host families first got together, Bailey and Dan in tow, did they start telling us to marry each other. I think, honestly, had we given them the opportunity to perform the ceremony, they might have gone right ahead. Dan's host brother Jeremiah, newly married himself, told Dan, who later told me, that I was grown up and deserved a husband. Jeremiah's wife would tell me, "Dan loves you, he really does." Dan and I always laughed, and Dan would remind them, again, that he had a girlfriend. "Oh, that doesn't matter. You two should get married." Eventually we just stopped wasting our breath, but it never really stopped being funny.

At the end of our stay, our two families got together to make a goodbye dinner for me and Dan. Since we had been harrassed about our apparent love affair all week, Dan and I started joking about it and declaring it our wedding feast. They gave us two seats next to each other at the plastic table in my Meme's (Mom) living room, and when they brought out a cake at the end of the evening, Dan and I took it upon ourselves to hold the knife together in our overlapped hands and slice our dessert as a husband and wife should.

We were also both overcome with emotion that evening. So many people crammed in the small house, illumed by candles. We drank "cooldrink," pineapple Fanta. They sang to us, we sang to them ("Leavin' on a Jet Plane"--John Denver always comes in handy when put on the spot to sing a song). People who knew us for ten days cared about us so much. When you're faced with such a circumstance, you don't really know how to react. Except to just clutch the swelling in your heart, I guess, and thank God you're so blessed to be loved so much for no good reason other than He loved us first, and sometimes we follow His example and are lucky enough to get it right. My host sister, Kristi, cried when I left, and I'm not sure why I didn't, because I certainly was on the verge.

I loved looking out the window that week and seeing a cow or a goat walking in the sand. We didn't have chickens of our own, but the neighbors did, and the little cluckers would climb through the holes in the fence to visit, pecking for specs of things to eat. My family had a chicken for one day, and then we had dinner and no longer had a pet in the morning. Every time I went to the outhouse to pee, a couple of geckos on the wall would swish out of sight in a flash, and I would pray they wouldn't accost me while I took care of business.

I loved hearing the endless "Walalepo, Meme"s (good morning) from everyone I passed in the town, curtsying and offering the belabored Oshiwambo response, "Eeeh" (yes, as in "yes, I'm having a good morning"), like a Canadian really stretching out the length of her "Eh?" Heck, I enjoyed being called "Meme" (may-may) for ten days of my life. I equally enjoyed addressing older men as "Tate" (tah-tay).

At the end of the semester we considered printing "Who's your Tate?"--translation, Who's your Daddy?--on t-shirts, but a couple of girls said it made them too uncomfortable. I definitely voted in support of this t-shirt idea, even though it ultimately lost. Oh well. Being adopted in a desert is winning enough for me.