Hurra for syttende mai

It was the 17th of May, the Norwegian National Day. I last celebrated it in 1994, so I felt rather small and un-Norwegian as I showed up on the Norwegian mission station in Arusha. Two girls, in blond curls, red white and blue ribbons and pretty dresses informed me that they'd show me how it was done. "First we need these flags, then we are going to have a parade, then games, and then hot dogs and ice cream." And so the parade began, with music and pomp and fanfare. Well, ok, so maybe we weren't quite enough people to create fanfare, and perhaps we lacked the coordination to produce pomp, but we did have music. A cd-player played some patriotic music--we could hear it when our parade turned the corner where it stood. There were 9 of us, and we walked around the driveway roundabout. There were never more than 5 of us walking in the parade, since at least 3 of us walked backwards in front, taking pictures. We sang the national anthem, and then proceeded to games on the lawn: horse-shoes, sack-race, potato-relay, rope-skipping contest, balloon game, and the all-time favorite--the fishing game, all with prices (trinkets from little Arab shops in town plus one coveted pack of chocolate bars from Norway). We grilled hot dogs and wrapped them in lefser that a grandmother in Norway had made. In the afternoon, we were tired and full and the three children walked around with their pockets or skirts bulging with candy loot, their stomachs hurting, and their clothes crumpled. They were happy. They had woken up at 5:30 am, the way one does on days that involve parades and party games. I am not sure it could have been any more perfect if they had been in Norway and the children had numbered something more than three. As for me, I feel no more patriotic--I have lived in the US just long enough to dislike that word--but the celebration was quite palatable. It celebrated our constitution (we had one Kenyan man visiting, so we got to explain it all to him), but it did not include any speeches about the glory of war or how much greater than others our country is. It's just more tasteful to keep that bit of information to ourselves.