Leli

 

Batuku!

So I hope this will be a real treat for everyone at home. This is a short clip from a video I shot a while back, but should give you a pretty good idea of what the Cape Verdian batuku style of music and dance is all about. As you can see, it's pretty spicey. This is a "semi-professional group, so they've got real drums, but in most of the rural villages, they use plastic sacs filled with clothes. The thing tied around the waste of the dancer is called Pano d'Terra and is a holdover from WAY back in the day. (Excuse the watermark...in order to get this down to a size that wouldn't break me trying to upload it, I had to use some demo software.)

Dropping Copters

 

So, no, I"m not throwing kids out the window here. Rather, I've been teaching the kids about methods of transportation this week and today we talked about helicopters. Except for maybe in a movie, kids here have never seen one, so I made them all a bunch of paper helicopters and let them paint them and later we went to the top of the association building to drop them out the window and let them fly. They worked GREAT!

Casa de Trapiche

 

Txan d'Riba

 

Ribeira de Inveirno

 

Sugarcane in Garça