... you are walking up to watch an edonga (jump/dance) at a wedding, and an old woman grabs your hand and speaks in completely unintelligible ngaKarimojong while dragging you, against your will, towards the circle.
Martha and I were at the wedding of two mzungu (white) friends who live and work as missionaries in another part of Karamoja -- they decided to have three ceremonies, a traditional Karimojong wedding, a wedding ritual that's part of the tradition of the Samburu tribe in Kenya (where Val used to work), and a traditional Western style Christian wedding. We arrived between weddings one and two, and as we were trying to find the location of the Kenyan ceremony, we got pulled towards the edonga. One woman dragged Martha towards the circle to jump. Martha jumped a few times and seemed to enjoy it. I hung back; I did NOT want to jump (I've done it before, but I felt weird about it this time because there were no other young women jumping) but I also was losing sight of Martha so I kept inching closer; I didn't want to lose her.
Then the akimat (old woman) arrived, and she wouldn't take no for an answer. She grabbed my hand and started pulling me. I found Martha and pleaded with her, "please don't make me go in the circle!" Martha told the woman I was just a visitor and I was shy, but she didn't care. She kept pulling me up to the edge of the circle. At this point I knew there was no point resisting. There were basically no women jumping. If there had been I wouldn't have felt so weird about it.
The akimat was far to old to actually jump, so she just gripped my hand and swayed back and forth in time. Apparently I was just supposed to know when to jump (the men in the circle chant, and there are appropriate times when the women are supposed to jump, I guess to kind of emphasize what's just been said in the story.) If you don't understand Karimojong fluently and you don't know the story and the pattern, you're guaranteed to fail. When I've jumped before, I've always been holding the hand of a teenage girl who will squeeze my hand just before the right moment, so I'm prepared, and then she'll jump with me, show me how it's done. But the akimat wasn't really helping me out so I just tried to guess when to jump, and I was usually wrong. This caused no small amount of laughter from the people standing around me.
Then it got worse. Grandma decided this wasn't good enough. She pulled me INTO the circle (women don't go in the circle!) where a few men were jumping and chanting. There were at least 100 Karimojong watching, maybe more. I was so embarrassed. So now I have all the young warrior men with the feathers in their caps grinning at me while the akimat continues to try to force me to jump. She kept saying, "Iyeni iyong" -- "you know".. I kept saying, "Emam! Emam! Ngayeni ayong!" but she didn't care. This continued for a couple minutes, with the men about twenty feet away jumping, and me and the akimat standing awkwardly, sorta jumping/swaying/yelling at each other.
Well, this was becoming quite the show, so then the men who had been jumping stopped and went to the edge of the circle, so only the akimat and I were inside the circle. They kept chanting and I kept messing up the timing of the jumps. Finally I gave up and kept trying to pull away, but grandma had a strong grip and so she stood there swaying and I just stood still and refused to keep jumping, and laughed awkwardly at myself, and stared at all the young Karimojong women on the edge of the circle with pleading eyes -- please, get me out of this mess!! But they just stared back and grinned. Finally I said "temokin" -- finished -- quite firmly to the akimat, and we left.
I was mortified, of course, and so thankful that no one I knew was watching (besides Martha, but she was so bombarded by women who were amazed that she could speak ngaKarimojong that I don't think she knew what was going on!). I was kind of upset about it because it was completely embarrassing, but when I caught up with Leah at the ceremony she told me not to worry about it; just think about it in a positive way. Serious field cred. Not everyone can say they jumped with an akimat in the middle of a huge Karimojong edonga. And as horribly awkward as it was, it was strangely fun, too. But I can say that only in retrospect :)
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