Culture Day (Written 5/19/06)

The week of jam packed excitement continued yesterday with my first Culture Day at Chanel. The teachers and student have been preparing for this day for weeks now, so I knew it was going to be a big deal. Culture Day is a day in which the four houses compete against each other in doing traditional Samoan siva's (dances) and tala (stories), and they are judged based on how good their dances our (1 for boys, 1 for girls), their stories and their house uniform. So each house had a different uniform based on their house color – I was quite surprised by all the work that went into making these different uniforms and I got a new blue lavalava out of it with the house name 'Tuna' on it which was quite cool.

 

So the festivities began at around 9am and there were a lot of parents and adults who came to see this event. While everyone was getting ready, the sun was nice and stayed behind the clouds but once the competition actually started, it decided it was time to make it's heat known – so there was no cloud cover for the rest of the day and since everything took place outside it was quite the drain. But a part of me did feel like I was back at camp again – taking videos and pictures of kids out in the hot sun. The performances were great though – especially since this is the first time I've seen traditional Samoan dances outside of a FiaFia (I've only seen these types of siva on television here but not in person). Once the dances were done, the kids moved on to doing their stories. All four stories (one per house) had the theme of Samoa's time under Tongan rule and how Samoa was freed from them – but what they were specifically saying during the stories, I couldn't tell you. Even if I didn't understand the words, I understood the meaning and these kids are quite funny when they want to be so it was good to see them have fun at school (and not be disturbing the class while doing it). I

 

Once everyone finished their stories, all 4 houses gathered back together again to hear the results – this was a full blown competition with judges and everything. The winner of the Chanel Culture Day was….Saga/Green House/Slytherin. My house came in second, but like I said it was still a good day overall. Afterwards, we ate some food together as a house and then the kids went home. Did they go home early? Nope! This event let out at the same time the kids would have been done with school – 1:15pm. So we were out in the hot sun for 4 hours, ack! I was tired and in need of a shower bad after that. As for coming in second place, as any Cubs fan knows all to well…."there's always next year." L8r.