Thanksgiving Rwandan Style

After much harassment from my mother, I have written one very long blog post, which I will post under separate titles that address all the different things I’ve been up to. Thanksgiving was a great success. The turkeys went in the pit around 8 am and were covered in charcoal and banana leaves. Team stuffing pulled through with me as the “chemist”, mixing all of the ingredients until it was just right. We started peeling and cutting around 12:30 with a team of five, which gradually increased until we were a well oiled machine of about 10. We had peelers, bread dryers, fire starters, broth makers and mixers. We cooked on three small charcoal stoves, which made the process a bit more tedious than if we had a nice gas stove and oven, but we managed. A great highlight from team stuffing: A Peace Corps car was supposed to come pickup the huge vat of stuffing at 6 and we were going to get a glass of wine before dinner, but it was never sent, so Joel got fed up and with a sudden burst of testosterone and adrenaline through the pot of stuffing for 100 people on his shoulder and went flying up the road to center. Meanwhile, Nelson, the only other man there was already to help, so he went running off after Joel. Us girls just stood on the side of the road watching Joel disappear up the hill with Nelson hovering around him in case he dropped the pot. It was pretty priceless.

Around 6 pm all the food was ready and we sat down to an amazing meal of turkey, mashed potato, mashed sweet potato, stuffing, green been casserole (with fried onions of course), substitute cranberry sauce (artificial plum jam), apple cider, apple crisp, and cookies. It was amazing to sit down to a meal with sixty-eight other Americans who had spent the entire day working tirelessly together in order to guarantee that our first Thanksgiving was a success. Before dessert, two trainees presented the history of Thanksgiving in English and Kinyarwanda to our Rwandan teachers, since it was the first Thanksgiving for many of them. To show them how thankful we are, we presented them with a huge banner that we all wrote personal notes on. Peace Corps was kind enough to extend our curfew until 11 (crazy, huh?) so we could go out and relax. We had a brief dancer party, complete with Miley Cyrus’ Party in the USA, and then headed into town. Friday morning was not pleasant for anyone – too much turkey and that extra hour of socializing did us all in.