Fetching Water

Kente Cloth, Bare Feet and Earthen Pots

         On Thursday afternoon just before sundown women walk to the River Tordze on the edge of Kpetoe to symbolically fetch water for the festival visitors. This ancient tradition has been revived to demonstrate the great hospitality of the people of Agotime. Barefooted, nearly all the women of the community go to the river. There they decorate themselves and each other. They are dressed in different traditional Kente attire balancing earthen pots that they fill with water from the river. Walking back to the village they sing and dance until they reach the forecourt of the Paramount Chief where each woman pours her water into a big pot at the palace.

The village women begin to come to the river.

The white body paint is so striking.

They gather grass and wind it for head pieces to balance their pots.

     This was such a colorful and heartfelt expression of how much water plays in the lives of all of us. These little ones with their big eyes were perched here on the bridge with all of us ready to sell water and someday in the future they will carry on this tradition of fetching water.