Mahachap visit one – the village

Mahachap visit one – the village

A village house, the blue door at the bottom led to my temporary bed room.

The very top of the village, a just harvested corn field. The wooden hut was build last year for visitors to relax in.

The rice smashing machine

The village is situated to the north west of Tansen just over a hill. The houses are dotted around all leading up the school, which is almost the highest point is it were not for a small group of house and a corn field just higher on the west side of the school. The people in the village are always exuberantly happy. Seeing if I am OK, if I need anything, especially food or drink I rarely managed to drink half before I was offered a re-fill; however, I found out this is part of their culture, guests shouldn’t want for anything. They have an odd type of rice here, it’s kind of like dried flakes of rice, it is really tasty, a bit like corn flakes. They make it using a machine which is basically a whole into which rice is placed and then it is pummelled with a ‘hammer’ on a wooden leaver, it shells the rice and turns it into the dried flakes; however, I couldn’t establish if it was cooked after or dried out. 

some traditional dancing by village members

Me being taught the group dance

The favourite past-time in the village must be dancing and singing; they love it! During the time I was there they danced and sung along to traditional folk songs; however, they do have for recent music but that necessitates a CD player and there was no power during my entire stay. The singing is accompanied by handclaps, drumming and occasionally a tambourine. The drums come in two sizes, small and large, they can be seen in the photographs but basically consist of a cylinder with a little drum at one end and a big drum at the other. They are really difficulty to play as you need to hit the little drum just right to produce any sound. Now I don’t dance but these people were insistent, they just dragged you up there, especially the children. I managed to get the hand of it in the end after they had given me some lessons (and hired the tarp roof because I was too tall). The dancing falls into two basic categories: group and individual. The group dancing was the easiest, this is the one I normally indulged in when encouraged to get up there. It starts with several people in a circle holding hand and you just step to the side, but a foot in the middle and lift your arms up, then continue with this increasing speed with the music. It is a very simple dance but still took me a day to get my head around. The individual dance is just as simple but at the same time much for difficult. It only involved spinning around and oscillating your arms up and down, there was also some hand movements but I could work those out. The problem is that after about two minutes you are extremely dizzy even with consistent rotational changes. There was dance that combined the two with an individual in a the middle a group circle, I only did this twice and had to stop both times because I was going to fall over from dizziness.  After awhile I noticed that the songs did not increase in tempo as much when I danced. Normally the song started slow and built until the dancers couldn’t keep up with the music and stopped; however, I noticed that the tempo never increased beyond a certain point when I was dancing – I was grateful for that. 

Drumming in action

Group drumming