This Turkey don’t dance.

Every Monday and Wednesday night, I give an English course to adults from the community.  What was, at its largest, a class of 20 has dwindled to a steady 8 to 10, but the students are eager and learn quickly, and are willing to try just about any activity I throw at them.  It’s one of the best parts of my week.

The other night, we had a class on celebrations.  I asked students to share their favorite celebrations and what they do.  I love this topic, since it usually brings out funny stories and a lot heckling from fellow classmates.  Why?  Because there is absolutely no shortage of reasons to celebrate in Panama.  After teaching the appropriate questions and discussing the words for various activities, the class turned the table on me.  “Chelsea, what is your favorite celebration in the United States?” someone asked.  I explained Thanksgiving in all its gluttonous glory, and since we’re still at a basic level for listening, the description was simple. “We get together.” “We eat a lot.” “We talk and drink with family.” “And then…we sit and talk some more.”  The students stared back in stunned silence.  I wondered if I had said something wrong.  “Did you understand?” I asked.  They did. “But Chelsea, do you dance on Thanksgiving?” My face twisted into embarrassment and I muttered no.  “Do you dance on other holidays, then?” was the response.  I combed my memories for a celebration where dance just always spontaneously happens.  Zero.

Compared to my students’ descriptions of holidays mine seemed duller than a box of corn flakes.  “Dance” is nearly every Panamanian student’s favorite verb, in my opinion even beating out the universal “eat,” as it is such an essential part of life here.  For every single favorite holiday in the room, whether it was a patron saint festival, Independence Day, or Christmas, or even Mother’s Day, dancing in some form was inevitably included.  As you saw in the slaughter post, it doesn’t have to be a holiday to dance.  It doesn’t have to be the weekend, night time, or three sheets to the wind, either.  I myself was even confounded.  I had spent the past six months in a country where dancing is an integral part of any get together.  As someone who loves to dance, none of this has ever, ever felt uncomfortable to me, has in fact felt quite the opposite.  It felt blasphemous to admit that I like holidays where there isn’t really any dancing.

I don’t think our holidays are dull—I wished I could describe the joy of the warmth of sharing a giant meal with the people I love and bundling up against the cold outside, the hype surrounding a football game, the simple smell of that season.  Here, sharing a giant meal with family is much more common, and later when we spoke after class, my students pointed out that they understood.  In a country as big as ours the simple feat of getting your loved ones all in one place, for many people, makes a holiday.  Suddenly, everything became clearer for both me and my students.  This is why is takes so much work for so many foreigners to come close to looking half as natural as a Panamanian on a dance floor.  We just don’t do it enough.

So here is my challenge to you in your next gathering: let the dancing happen, grab a partner, or don’t, and just go for it.  Be that guy in the family.  Tell people you’re trying to use all that energy you have from the second helping of whatever it was that was on the table.  And then get back to me so I can tell my students that we’re slowly working our way out of this.