Today, I did something that you would have never guessed. I went to so many different places (Huli villages to be exact). I saw many different Huli people with different jobs and I learned something that I think you probably never knew, MEN AND WOMEN WHO ARE MARRIED DON’T LIVE TOGETHER!
People use pigs as money at every village and since pigs are my favorite animal, like Eve’s favorite is a polar bear and I think Izzy’s is a hedgehog, I thought that was smart to have the pigs used as currency. Also, we watched the Huli men do archery and they were very good. I tried archery twice or maybe even three times, but I failed every time. The way I failed was I shot the arrow and it just fell out of the bow.
Did you know that Huli people think that Huli men have special magical powers? The way the Huli men use their power is to put their power on a person. For example, if they wanted another Huli man to miss while doing archery, the Huli Man’s power’s would make the other man miss. It seems like magic to me. What do you think? That was the first village I visited.
The second village was cool, but we only spent a short time on a grass field where we got to see the Huli Men in their ceremonial costume and face paint. There was a lot of interesting stuff there like, feathers that stood up that are brown and sometimes very light brown. There were beautiful arrows that the Huli Men had carved and painted. The Huli Men were kinda scary, because they had so much “makeup” on. They call this type of make-up, face painting. Both had yellow faces, but one of the Huli Men made me a little more frightened than the other one. His face paint was much brighter yellow so he looked scarier. They both had wigs from the wig school (you’ll learn more about that later). One wig was to wear everyday and the other one was a ceremonial Huli Man wig that had lots of tall bird feathers. The Huli Men in the “makeup” were actually pretty darn awesome. I wish you could have seen them.
While we were with the Huli Men at the second village, we did an awesome lacrosse video (check out lacrosse around the world on our blog to see it.)
Wig school was the best village experience I had all day. If you don’t know what wig school, is which, I did not and you probably don’t. It is where they make the traditional tribal wigs for the Huli Men. The reason they make these wigs is to let everyone in the town know they want to be married. It is a rite of passage for the Huli Men. They must grow their hair for 18 months, without washing it, brushing or even sleeping on it. I felt bad because the Huli Men there had to sleep on sticks on their necks so their hair didn’t get damaged. They do something called watering their hair, where they got wet leaves and shake them on their hair. They water their hair 3 times a day. WOW!
After all of the Huli villages, we went to a waterfall. It was gigantic and it had so much force that at first, I thought it was drizzling, but the water was actually the spray from the waterfall. We had also seen two waterfalls the day before, but those were a lot smaller and I still thought that they were huge. When I saw the one today, I wondered if I was at Niagara Falls and not in the Papau New Guinea rainforest.
I had a great day and learned so much about the Huli people and their traditions.
