Vamos dançar!

So, ever since I got here, I've been trying to get the neighborhood kids to teach me Mozambican dances. Well, the first step- finding kids- is not a problem. As soon as they can walk, crianças pretty much wander around outside together all day, latching on to anything and anyone interesting enough to play with, especially the weird foreign Americans. Organizing said crianças though... that's a different story.

Anyway, I had my chance one evening when a friend of my host-sister Teresa's came over to our house for a short visit. Her name is Cozinha, or Zinha, and she's probably my favorite of the neighborhood kids- she's always smiling and friendly, but she's also calm and responsible, unlike your typical neighborhood criança. While she was over, we got to talking, and she and Teresa enthusiastically agreed to show me some dances and have me videotape them. Unfortunately, though, it was too dark for the video to show anything, and I told them we'd have to do it again later during the day. I didn't hold out too much hope for this though, since I expected Zinha and Teresa to forget about it for at least a couple weeks.

The next day, Saturday, I got home around noon from morning language classes to find Teresa and Zinha... and about six other neighborhood kids, including my little brother Mundo. Zinha came up to me excitedly, "Mana Helena!" she said (mana means 'big sister'- it's common for kids to call any older girls that), "Can we make the dance video now?!?"

Well... who can say no to that? :)

First, I tried to have them show me some of their dances. To varying success:

My host-sister Teresa is in the yellow shirt and blue pants, and Mundo is the little guy in the blue shirt. Zinha has the red and yellow skirt. By the way, don't ask me where any of these dances actually come from- I tried to ask them what the various ones they showed me are called, and they just gave me blank stares. Then again, my Portuguese still wasn't too great at the time, so that probably didn't help.

Then they also wanted a video with me dancing. Unfortunately, Zinha and Teresa kept accidentally changing the camera settings and/or pressing the 'Start' and 'Stop' buttons right after each other, so we made literally fourteen videos that each turned out something like this:

Or this:

Guys, are you sure that's the right button...?

But finally we conseguir-ed!

"Agora vamos ver Mana Helena a dançar!" means "Now we're going to see big sister Helena dance!". The crianças like their chants. As evidenced by the next video I took, where they kept chanting even though obviously I wasn't dancing anymore:

Good times had by all! :D