The Kenyan Wedding

Yesterday my good friend Jane got married to John (usually known by his surname, Miano). Both of them are Volunteers. Jane is from the Isle of Lewis in Scotland and Miano is from Nairobi. This pairing caused much excitement locally and I don’t think Njoro has ever seen anything like it. I was even stopped beforehand by locals who intercepted me on my way to the dairy to ask me about it. In these rural parts, they couldn’t believe that a white woman would marry a Kenyan.

To be honest they were right to be skeptical (not that I told them so) as the whole thing was an elaborate hoax. The couple, while good friends, were not really getting married.

Jane didn’t fly to Kenya with a wedding dress but she’s been to Nakuru this week and amazingly managed to get one for 100/= (which is less than 1 pound)!!!

She was to have 3 bridesmaids: her Kenyan counterpart (Mercy), the other female in her working group (Georgina) and me. 

I went over to Jane's house on the morning, carrying 20 hot chapattis in a plastic bag as a contribution to the wedding feast. Jane was very nervous, ironing her dress, and wondering why on earth she’d agreed to the whole thing. One of her main worries was that her parents, (who are a bit cautious about  Jane's adventures, having never left the UK), weren’t convinced that the wedding wasn’t real – they seemed to think that Jane was being hoodwinked into a union that she didn’t intend to make. It’s not easy having such unhappy parents on your wedding day. Luckily they were very safely on the other side of the world and so not in a position to intervene and had to limit themselves to distressing their daughter over text.

Once we were all dressed up and ready to go the Kenyan girls arrived and started getting ready. I was quite surprised by this. It’s the bride that’s meant to be late to the wedding, not the guests. It turned out that they’d been readying the venue all morning, they just hadn’t told us (otherwise we’d probably have been there to help). The other surprising thing was that they proceeded to put on nice dresses in shades of black and white. This is so obviously inappropriate in the UK that it barely needs saying. Luckily the maid of honour had been tipped off in advance and so was wearing blue. It's the opportunity to learn about these cultural differences that makes the whole thing fun!

We had quite a bit of time while waiting for everyone to get ready and so I popped out to visit one of my entrepreneurs, bedecked in full finery and low heals (which is significant when you consider the uneven road terrain), to get a mandazi for the bride. Joshua had sent me a text message to say he’d done a batch of coffee flavoured ones that morning and Jane is particularly partial to his creations so it seemed like the right thing to do. She is probably the only bride ever to be sat on a sofa in a wedding dress munching on a mandazi while waiting for her girls to get dressed.

When everyone was ready we walked to the wedding venue, leaving just Jane and her maid of honour behind. Despite the fact that the venue was about 2 mins away on foot, they were waiting for the car to pick them up, in traditional fashion.

The trouble was that certain details of the wedding hadn’t been organised yet, particularly who would be where, when. The other problem was that half our wedding guests were volunteers in Nakuru town along with the wedding cake. Unfortunately the president was visiting Nakuru to celebrate the fact that the vice president had been acquitted of the charge of inciting the post election violence and all the roads had been shut as a safety precaution, preventing them from coming. By 12noon, the wedding was 2 hours late, the guests had arrived, I was quite bored and had been teaching ‘I’m sorry I haven’t a clue’ games to the children. At long last I set off on foot to collect the bride.

At the home I found Jane and Mercy (the maid of honour) rather restless, perhaps unsurprisingly. It was funny to see a woman in white wedding dress and veil stomping impatiently round a dusty Kenyan yard with washing flapping on a line overhead. We contacted our Program Coordinater to come in his car (he’s the most senior figure here) and I convinced Jane to wait 10 minutes for him before stomping her off to the wedding on foot. Luckily he did arrive in time.

John (our program coordinator) was absolutely delighted by the scene. He’d got balloons attached to the car and once we were inside he drove while beeping the horn continuously. To introduce John, he's best described like the character of God in ‘Bruce Almighty’ – to see him laughing and whooping was a very different experience. I wanted to ask if the volunteers had ever staged a wedding before, but seeing John’s reaction I no longer needed to – he’d definitely not ever had a team of volunteers do anything of the sort. I wasn’t sure whether he was s-bending in the road out of celebration or to avoid the potholes. From my seat in the back of the car it was hard to tell. When we got there they opened the field gates and all the guests crowded round singing. We hadn’t had a wedding rehearsal, choosing instead to have a hen night and so we didn’t actually know what to do. An Usher rushed over to the car when it stopped to tell us to get out when the music started playing, this was good, we at least had some sort of idea what to do. After what felt like a very long wait we heard ‘Isabella’ playing. It made me smile because it was inappropriately romantic for a fake wedding. The other thing that made me smile was the difficulty we had walking up the isle. We had to go very very slowly. Mercy and Jane had been practising this at home, but I hadn’t and rather struggled to go at the ridiculous pace. Worse still, it’s all caught on camera. The isle was flanked on each side by large white gazebo style tents full of wedding guests. They were decorated with tinsel, fake flowers and were populated by Kenyans and UK volunteers as well as a few locals. At the front of the isle was a Matt wearing a priest’s collar and his mama's sun glasses and ready to give a short sermon on the nature of love, Arman was summoned as best man to take a reading from the gospel of entrepreneurship. Matt had written some wedding vows which made everyone laugh and then announced that John may kiss the bride. To our absolute amazement the loving couple then proceeded to do just that.

Next the couple left the ‘church’ followed by best man, maid of honour and me to enjoy their first dance together which was very sweet and extremely well documented by the many cameras. The following step was the cake ceremony. This is very important in Kenyan ceremonies (because they don’t traditionally ‘kiss the bride’, they feed her cake instead. Our wedding was a hybrid so that's why we had both). So Jane fed Miano cake, Miano fed Jane cake. Then Jane fed the best man. Miano fed Mercy and me. Then the cake was cut up and all the guests were fed. Once everyone had eaten cake they went up to the buffet (which had tragically run out of plates when I got there, so I ended up eating off a second hand plate, using my hands instead of cutlery - classy). The entertainment of the afternoon was music and dancing as well as an enormous waterfight.