3rd Day

Hussein came in today 9.05am and I'll I explained to him about my lost luggage, this kind of changed the days schedule as we had to go to the airport and double good news I got my bag and one of the guys who works at the airport his next dooor neighbour is a Nyawu dancer. He decided to take us to the village and introduced us to two od the dancers and the dancers took us to the Chief. We sat down and the Chief was surprisingly welcoming and we explained to him our mission. For me I am really worried about the money situation but anyway I decided to ask him as he was explaining that he has 100 dancers and they will display the whole Gule Wamkulu to the fullest and explain each Gule characters. From my own understanding as a Zimbabwean Gule Wamkulu does not expose their secrets of their society and wouldn't just let anybody watch the background scenes. When I asked them how much is it going to cost, the Chief said it is going to be 60,000 kwacha which is a lot of money. After saying that he said they are not a business it is their culture, they are happy to share their culture and maybe contribute as much as I can. This is quite tricky for me how to go about it. I decided to phone Iyshea, on my side I am worried about the money as this poroject is starting to become expensive and Iyshea reflected the same through the phone and she was really down and very worried, which worried me even more. I said to the Chief we will come back on tuesday and they can display what I really want to learn. After that we travelled 3 hours to Mowa village which is a museum of arts and culture. We got to video the first part of the museum but they refused for us to video the costumes of the Gule. On our way back we stopped to interview people and they spoke about the basic of Gule Wamkulu, but never went into too much detail. I've got all this footage on video. I feel like this was a very constructive day, we drove back the next 3 hours. For me it feels like driving to Mowa village and driving back from Mowa village is a lesson just by itself. Watching how they live, just seeing women carrying water on their heads, small children as young as 3 walking by themselves for miles. We dropped off one of the boys who we intereviewed home, and if we hadn't picked him up he would have been walking for 2 hours just to get home from school. He does this everyday there and back.