What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?

As a result of my inability to last five days at camp I, along with the three other quitters, was home for New Year's Eve.

On an earlier occasion I had heard Sheilla, one of our Ugandan hostesses, referring to her "African spirit" and I spent some time over the holiday weekend thinking about how badly I needed some African spirit. It's my opinion that African spirit is whatever it is in the village kids that makes them smile so brightly even though they are hungry. It's what made camp fun for all those people even though we were all sharing a water pump. Sheilla uses hers to get up and unlock a seriously barred front door at dawn even though she only got to bed at midnight. The African spirit is most evident whenever we are called to praise and worship.

On New Year's Eve Jonah, a Ugandan EAC employee, attended one such service that began in the evening and was projected to run all night. I don't think any Mzungus had what it takes to accept his invitation to join, but I can imagine the noise of the crowd and the loud, powerful singing and the warm, heartfelt prayers. Africans don't hold back when they are praising their Lord. That bold, shameless ability of expression is something Americans are sorely lacking. I wondered that night if I had ever once entertained the notion of staying up all night to thank God for the opening of a New Year, a new day, anything.

I remember as a child at Camp Susque how we would take one special night and go for a hike and stay out next to a campfire singing and praying and sharing until everyone was falling asleep. I remember looking forward to that every year, that time of uninterrupted reverence to God. But it still doesn't compare to the open hearts of an African praise and worship service. It was amazing to see how they'd taken a holiday that, for me, is completely meaningless and turned it into a beautiful time to worship. It makes me think how incredibly white Americans are. Not in skin color, but in their worship. For holidays we get together and have a 30 minute devotion and play some board games and I have never not enjoyed that kind of celebration. But why don't we have the other kind too? How come we're so vanilla? Why don't adults in America shout praise songs to ring in the New Year? I really think this is something we need to institute.

Not that I did it that night. Like I said, none of us accepted the invitation. We stayed at home, being white. We gathered all of the balloons that had been up for Christmas and I photographed four other Mzungus jumping off a wall and popping balloons at midnight. We had fun, but we didn't do much praising. Not out loud or as a group anyway.

We did venture out into the street after the stroke of twelve, to see what the neighbors were doing. While Christians in Uganda were praising and singing, the nonChristians were celebrating very much like Americans. The air out in the street was probably about 98% vodka and fireworks were going off in the city. People were dancing and celebrating and so for just a few minutes we stepped outside of our whiteness and danced with them. I laughed a lot that night.