Carving the Thanksgiving…Chicken

Today is the first BIG family holiday since our arrival last April. Although many of you are traveling to be with family, preparing massive feasts, and creating more holiday memories, we are starting to feel what it’s like to “celebrate” an American holiday outside of America. Now, there are a lot of Americans in our organization, so last Saturday, we had a large Thanksgiving feast which many of our colleagues attended. Americans, Dutch, South Africans, a Romanian and of course Germans were present. None of these other cultures has a Thanksgiving like ours, but when we asked why they came to celebrate with us, they gave the most obvious answer: the food is good. Duh!

The feast itself was true to American tradition – HUGE, to which we contributed two pumpkin pies (of course made from scratch!). Some of the organizers of the party had been asking visitors to bring special Thanksgiving foods/ingredients from the States for the last several months. In July, one short-term couple even brought a frozen turkey (on dry ice) all the way from the States. It arrived frozen solid, but then over the next several weeks began to thaw due to the every-other-day electrical outages this summer. So, it had to be cooked and then refrozen. Why bring a turkey in your luggage? You see, although we can buy turkey during this time of year, the price is REALLY high because they are all imported. I saw a sign in one grocery store that said “Turkey, imported from Italy,” just for fun I asked the price and was told 225 birr a kilogram (that’s over $8 a pound). I was talking with someone today and they said that their diehard American friends just had to have turkey and so splurged 1600 birr for one (that’s about $128). To some, that’s worth it for the Spirit of Thanksgiving. For us, chicken serves us just fine!

Last Saturday’s party was nice, but we and our American housemates (Grant and Melissa) didn’t want the actual Thanksgiving Day to pass us by unnoticed. Therefore, together we bought a chicken (only $8 for the 3 pound bird), made some more pumpkin pie, sweet potatoes (which have very little taste here), cranberry stuff (made out of some care package craisins), and Andrea is even trying to make Travis’ family favorite - Monkey Bread! So, despite being away from family and going to school as normal today, it is starting to feel and smell like Thanksgiving around our house (except there will be no Lions and Cowboy games after the meal). We have so very much to be thankful for. As is our tradition, every Thanksgiving, we make a list of 100 things that we are thankful for in the past year. This year, 100 things will not be nearly enough to exhaust our gratitude. For the Lord has, and continues to be good to us.