St. Peter's Day Weekend Celebrations

On June 27^th and 28^th, Likoma Island hosted a celebration of St. Peter. St. Peter’s Cathedral, of course, takes Peter’s name. The festival weekend began with a baptism ceremony on Saturday afternoon, with approximately 30 babies being baptized. While this may sound like a lot of babies, baptism ceremonies near Easter and Christmas can have well upwards of 80 babies! Katherine was kindly asked to stand with one of the mother’s as the godmother of her 6 week old son, Smith. At her turn, she handed the baby to the priest, who tipped his head back to pour the water on it. She also held the candle with the godfather, a friend of the mother and teacher at St. Peter’s Primary School, aptly named Wisdom. I on the other hand, assisted the clergy during the ceremony (the clergy here have taken to calling me the future Dean of St. Peter’s!).

Immediately after the baptisms, we hurried back to our house. A friend of Katherine’s from the hospital, Bertha, was supposed to bring us a chicken! The way we understood it, it was a baby hen to whom we could tend during our time here and then eat it before departing. We wouldn’t really have to do much with it, as chickens just wander anywhere they please in Malawi. However, when we arrived back at our home from the church, the woman was holding the chicken in one hand and a knife in the other! As it turned out, she wanted to give us a local chicken to eat. So, we watched her slaughter it, and then had to figure out how in the world we were going to clean the chicken! With the help of a neighbor woman, Katherine and I plucked the feathers, cleaned out the guts, and two hours later placed our chicken in the refrigerator for later preparation by our cook. What a process!

The next morning, we arose at our usual 6am, took our breakfast, and prepared for church. Little did we know, our entire day would be consumed by St. Peter’s Day celebrations. The Mass, which usually takes about three hours, turned into five hours, filled with singing, dancing, an hour-long sermon, and of course all of the usual prayers. After this, all of the “visiting dignitaries,” the UK boys, visiting clergy, and we were invited to a lunch of traditional Malawian cuisine, very similar to what we have been eating at our house. Once dinner was finished, we made our way back to the “cathedral stadium,” which is a somewhat flat space of dirt with not too many rocks where events in our neighborhood are held.

What we had been told is that an entire host of activities would occur at this performance, including traditional African (Malawian) dancing, singing and music. Katherine and I were expecting perhaps a few hundred people to turn out to this event. However, by the time everything was in full swing, we, along with the Dean of the Cathedral estimated the crowd to be no less than THREE THOUSAND, all standing, cheering, and yelling during the activities! What an event!! We both enjoyed the entertainment very much, but one of the most entertaining things was this middle-aged gentleman who was some sort of an official at these activities. He walked around the entire time with this big stick, moving it back and forth as though he was wielding a sickle cutting wheat or grass. He did this to threaten all of the little children who kept creeping in on the performance area, threatening to fill it in with their little bodies. Just watching him go around swinging this stick within millimeters of children, threatening to beat them made us laugh quite a bit as we though of how this would be viewed in the U.S.: probably some parents would have filed a lawsuit for threatening to harm their children, but here it is just a part of the culture.

After the long day on Sunday, and a restful night’s sleep to recover, Monday arrived. Due to Monday being the technical St. Peter’s Day, it was a holiday on much of the island. Therefore Katherine and I didn’t have work on Monday. Our work came later on in the day, with our sports tournaments. Derek played football (soccer) on the clergy’s team against the local boys. Katherine played “netball” (a sort of soccer/basketball combination popular here) on a team with some women of the church against the local girls. Both games were very entertaining for everyone, us included, even though both of our respective teams lost. The clergy were up at one point by one goal, but we fell behind at the very end. With the end of the games, the St. Peter’s Day celebrations came to an end, and Tuesday began the new work week.

Women doing a traditional Malawian dance at St. Peter's Day activities