I Do

I was lucky to be invited to a wedding recently. Well, I say lucky - actually I was one of about 300 names on the guestlist, alongside the canteen lady, the gardener, and that odd man that lives three villages down the road. Such is a Sabahan wedding, at least in the village: everyone is invited to celebrate with the family. When I tried to explain to the teacher inviting me that at the last wedding I attended, we had 120 spaces and that was it, she simply couldn't understand. "Not everybody could come?" "Well, no, we only had a few spaces at the tables." "But why didn't you just let people sit outside?" "Well, we didn't have enough food for extra people." Long silence. "You didn't make enough food?" And I can see the horror in her eyes.

Anyway. I felt very privileged to be invited. It was a Catholic wedding, so the first part was in the town church. We got hurried up to the front at the end to take a place in the photos, which felt a bit odd. I can just imagine the conversations twenty years down the line, when Mum brings out her wedding photos and her teenagers ask her who the orang putihs in the photo are. She'll be stumped, as we actually never met her - not before, and not during the wedding - she was far too busy to be paying attention to who was in attendance! (I was invited by her mother, who teaches at one of my schools). 

After the church wedding, we all drove out to the village where the bride's mother's house had been transformed, ready to welcome the hundreds of guests with plenty of makan-makan. The entrance area had a pre-prepared photo of the happy couple and a guestbook and some happy Pooh bears and some flowers and two thrones and some more flowers and... 

We were sad we couldn't stay too long - we watched the couple arrive, greeted with traditional gongs, and then we ate with everybody - we almost got away with sitting in the rows of chairs at the back, but my lovely friend Madiah (mother of the bride) saw the two of us, and immediately bumped us up to the secondary tables. 

So we got to eat some great Dusun food in style :)