India

About a month ago my classmates informed me that we would be preparing a dance as a part of a school project. Our class was assigned the country India. I wasn´t entirely sure what all being a part of the dance would entail, but it sounded fun so I signed up. In the meantime, the other girls in the class went and found a dance instructor to help us with the choreography and a few Bollywood videos for inspiration. Whenever we found freetime during school we would push the desks aside and work on the dance. I´ll admit that it´s the first choreographed thing I´ve done since my fifth grade days in the Sitka Skippers. As the week of the ¨World Fair¨ approached we all began to realize that the dance was not exactly near completion. The girls (who generally do all the work while the boys tend to screw around) went and found another dance professor to help us finish up the dance in time. We ended up having two separate hour long practice sessions a day (each with a different instructor) and it was kept secret from the original teacher that we had hired another. Vivianne (my fellow Swiss AFSer) and I played dumb (not always that difficult) and acted as if we knew nothing about having 2 teachers.

The day of the Fair, classes were suspended in order to have time to prepare. The previous day my class had all headed over to my Indian classmates house where his mom spent hours painting detailed Henna on each girls´s arm. All the while she was preparing delicious Indian food to be sold the next day. Friday, the day of, we arrived at the school around 9 and set to work setting up our Indian themed ¨stand¨. The 80 degree weather that early in the morning didn´t seem to promising to me, and the thunder storms that ensued later weren't that comforting either.

Around 4 o'clock the girls all showed up at Lorena's house for hair and makeup. Lorena's mom used to have a salon inside her house, so it worked out great. The only problem was that it took a little longer than expected to dry, straighten and style each girls hair. The Fair supposedly started at 6:30 and around 8:30 the last car full of dolled-up, Indian-dressed girls pulled out of the driveway, rushing to make it to the school in time for our spot in the program. My entire class, boys and girls alike, were all quite nervous as we waited backstage. Surprisingly, I wasn't in the least (I suppose it's all that DDF). The dance went pretty well and there were only a few mistakes made. Unfortunately, we didn't win the contest, but it was a fun experience nonetheless.