Gawai Celebration

 Here is our final Gawai party for the month of June.  Gawai runs through the entire month and President John of the Masai Branch decided to have one last "bash" near the end of the month.
The sign, on the wall, is written in Iban.  The Iban people are the original people of East Malaysia.  Their language is different from "bahasa".  This saying is, "Happy Gawai Day", 2013, Long Life and Peace"

 Here we are, trying to hug the wall and stay out of the way.  Everyone is asked to dance and participate in the Gawai Celebration.  It's only a matter of time before someone comes over to you and asks you to get up and make a fool of yourself.  I'm quite good at that.

 The Gawai party begins at 5 PM, with a banana tree put up in the middle of the chapel.  You can see it strung up to the lights, with lots of bags of "goodies and treats" hanging all over the tree.
This is Elder Meister, who began the opening ceremony of the banana tree.

 Someone is chosen to go up to the tree, with a machette in hand, and cut down one of the treats and place the treat in a blue bin, next to the tree.
Of course, I was asked to go up first.  I didn't know what I was suppose to do, so I danced around the tree and cut off a bag of peanuts and took the bag back to my seat.  What a mistake.  You were suppose to drop the treat in the bin, which no one told me.  We quickly fixed that and I handed my machette off to this sister next, so she could do things correctly.

 There is all kinds of beautiful dancing, with traditional Gawai costumes on.  This is some of our Young Women, doing one of the dances.  They have gorgeous, metal headdresses on and very colorful shoulder wraps and skirts, with many metal tinkling ornaments.  Really something to see.

 After the dancing by the Young Women, the 4 Masai Elders got up and sang a song they created.  Elder Tan is brand new on the left, then Elder Meister, who goes home in 73 days, then our District Leader, Elder Chan (whose father was just called as an Area 70) and finally, on the right, is Elder Gaultier. 

 Following the Elders, all the Young Women got up to sing and perform.  Each group is asked to do something for the Gawai Party.  We began the festivities at 5 PM, then do all this dancing and performing until about 8 PM and then we all went upstairs to the Relief Society room and ate a catered meal.  Great food and lots of fun.

 The final part of the Gawai celebration is to cut down the banana tree for another year.  Elder Meister begins by dancing around the tree and cutting off one banana leaf at a time.

 As he is cutting off the banana leaves, the Young Women dance around the banana tree in their traditional dress and traditional Gawai music.  The room is very quiet and everyone focuses on the tree and the young ladies dancing around.

 Elder Meister is getting down to only 2 banana leaves left on the tree.  The children get more and more excited, since they get the treats in the blue bin, after the tree is finally cut down and taken out of the room.

 Here, he is down to just one more leaf and you can see the blue bin full of bags of popcorn, bags of peanuts and other treats from the store.  Many of our Saints in Masai, are Iban, and this Gawai party is very special to them each year.  Everything is done just as it would be performed in East Malaysia.  Over there, they have "long houses" and hundreds of people participate in this traditional tree cutting ceremony.

 The leaves are all gone and now Elder Meister must cut off the tree trunk in the middle, as the Young Women circle the banana tree one more time.  You can see how beautiful the dresses are.  I was amazed how the girls keep the heavy metal head pieces up and connected so well to their hair and heads.  Many sisters, in our branch, have these shoulder wraps, that are hand made.

 Finally, the tree is cut at the base and all the branches and leaves are removed from the center of the chapel.  Then the kids go crazy grabbing for all the treats.  Following that, each group of people, sitting around the edges, gets up to dance.  Their traditional Gawai dance is similar to our "line dancing". 

 Here, the elders and all the men were asked to get up.  They only wanted the Young Men and all the Elders in the room.  I was the only High Priest, so I got out of this one.  I realized that I'm the only High Priest in all of Johor Bahru, a population of 1.8 million people.  Awesome!  Linda danced very well, and, of course, I was forced to get up and dance in front of everyone.  I was somewhat clumsy, but they love you anyway.

 After our Gawai party, we were given 2 different kinds of fruit that we haven't tasted before.  This one is already peeled and called, "longan".  It is a white see through fruit, the size of a large grape, with a black pit inside.  It tasted similar to a white grape.  It comes with a brown shell around it that you have to peel off.

 We ate some of these fruits and then Brother Gema gave us another one.  We didn't get the name of this one, but it is a bit larger than the "longan", looking like a small potato.  It also needed to be peeled off and inside was a white fruit with segments, similar to a very small orange.  This fruit I liked better than the "longan", tasting very close to grapefruit.

Here is a bowl of both fruits.  The "longan" is the fruit connected together with rubberbands, on the right side of the blue bowl.  The other grapefruit type fruit is the larger balls on the left of the bowl.  These are fruits eaten for Gawai and come from East Malaysia.  A few days ago, we ate at a members home and were given some dark, black eggs.  We asked what they were and were told they were duck eggs.  We asked how they made them black, and we were told, "Don't ask!"  After that, I didn't take anymore duck eggs.