A Hamomi Halloween

This Saturday we celebrated Hamomi’s 2^nd annual Halloween. It has become a beloved yet little understood holiday for the students and teachers here. Last year Jamie and Susie, the directors of Hamomi’s USA board based in Seattle, introduced the day and since it was such a great success, we continued the tradition. We spent this week brainstorming how we could explain and celebrate this pumpkin carving, trick-or-treating, fest of goblins and ghouls to Hamomi, without it being a mess of candy wrappers, pumpkin guts, and 135 sugar -high students. At first we thought about buying a pumpkin for each class to carve and decorate. However, after thinking it through and pricing out pumpkins, we concluded this was not the best option, nor was it in the budget. Trying to organize 12 to 18 students carving a single pumpkin would not have been a success by any meaning of the word. Not to mention, the undersized, whitish gourds they call pumpkins here, go for an outrageous 400-600 shillings. So back to the drawing board it was.

Another bright idea we had was for us to dress up in costumes and then do some trick-or-treating with the students. After quickly thinking this through we determined that maybe we’d attract even more unwanted attention on our walk through the Kawangware slum and into the Kangemi slum dressed as superheroes, animals, or the headless horseman. Also, knocking on peoples doors with 100 plus students, each demanding sweets would more than likely be seen as rude in the Kenyan culture and could possible tatter Homomi’s stellar reputation with its neighbors. Scratch that idea… Crazy Muzungu and their holidays.

So we settled on an idea brought originally to Hamomi by the first Halloween facilitators, Jamie and Susie. Decorating masks it is! Laurel and Val (a French volunteer from Venezuela) spent the next two full days cutting eye and mouth holes out of 150 paper plates. I offered the services of my Swiss army knife and found myself the more fun and less blister filled job of decorating a few sample masks for the students to see.

The day of was really fun. We circled up each grade on the Hamomi field and gave them paints, crayons, markers, colored pencils, feathers, water colors, construction paper, glitter and any other decorative material we could scrounge and the mask making commenced. I’m not so sure there were many superheroes or animals created, but many more colorful, nameless creatures began to take shape. I was really impressed, especially with the 1^st and 2^nd graders painting skills, although a few masks did end up that brownish-green color that mixing all the watercolors together makes.

At one point, Edwin, Hamomi’s English teacher, insisted I paint his face like a cat. After this I had a crowd of no less than four dozen students chanting “Cha, Cha Cha me next!!!” After about an hour of face-painting, the volunteers all grabbed the candy we’d brought and each group of went to a different classroom. Laurel and I began passing out candy from the baby-classroom and made each student say “trick-or-treat” before we gave them their sweet. Most of younger kids (who are just beginning to learn English) really tried to say what we wanted in order to get a treat. They came out with such things as “tick-and-tweet” or “sick-or-sweet” some just stared blankly until we gave them their candy. However, there was particular first grader who was quite insistent that, while he wasn’t quite sure what a “trick” was, he absolutely did not want one rather than his sweet! We passed out sweets to each student, teacher, and even a few of the other neighborhood children who couldn’t help showing up right around candy time.

All in all, Halloween was a great success! I hope you all enjoy the pictures.

Here's the link for the photo album:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=3098769&id=13956382&l=67178a85d6

-Eric