Meet the Dancers

Meet the Dancers

Aug. 24: 1. So today started out like any other Sunday, with church.  The boys put in 2 more service hours painting the stadium bleachers. Yay! Jamo got all painty within 5 minutes so he failed to take any pictures. :( It was Alex's first time painting, so he got to do something new! 

2. After dinner, we played Sequence for family game night, then moved onto Sergeant Major, a simple trump and tricks game. Our goal is to teach the boys Euchre, but Alex had never played American cards before. They have cards in Nigeria, but they are very different, so we thought we better start out with the basics!

3. After we put the twins to bed, the boys started dancing for each other, and doing all of these tribal and native dances! Not sure how they got started on this, but it was so fun to watch them all! I love these kids!

Jermaya went into great detail explaining his dances for me. There are 4 basic cultures in Egypt. He learned about them in school. He learned about the dances doing different programs like Yes! and IRIS. The Nuba culture dances this one for celebrations. The boys face the girls. The Nubians live in southern Egypt, mostly.

This one is from Jermaya's culture, the culture of Saeed. These people are located from the middle to the southern part of Egypt. The men dance with a stick and do different moves. The women do shoulder wiggles and hip wiggles. It is called the Tahteeb dance.

In upper Egypt, they dance with fishing nets, since they are a fishing culture. They throw the pretend nets down and do all kinds of moves like gathering up the nets. They act like they have fish in the nets. The girls were acting like fish in the beginning!

Alex's dance is from the Nigerian Middle Bell. The native dance is called the Tiv Dance. It reminded me a little of ballet.

Jamo's dance is all about the fancy footwork. This can be done to any fast song, mostly hiphop.

The boys spent almost an hour demonstrating dances for each other, watching videos of dancers. Jermaya asked Jamo to do the moonwalk-he was impressed! Twerking somehow also came up. They watched it on a video, and Jamo said it was bad! :)

I was really impressed that they were communicating through dance! It was so cool to watch them and listen to them. They even let me take these pictures, even though they were a little shy about it.