Thanksgiving Abroad

Last week Thursday was just another day for us. While our friends and families back in the States enjoyed time off, turkey, and pie, we went to work and had hardly any dinner. But we still found some ways to indulge our celebratory instincts, albeit somewhat non-traditionally.

WEDNESDAY: We had our co-workers from RELUFA over for homemade Chinese food. Rice, chicken (cooked in a mixture of soy sauce, sugar, garlic, and wine), sautéed veggies, and baguette. It was a lot of fun to host everyone, especially when Gilles showed us how to turn our electricity back on. (It was not a power outage as we’d thought; heavy rains earlier in the day had tripped an outdoor circuit breaker that we didn’t even know about.) We’d prepared everything by the light of our kerosene bush-lamps and our headlamps, thinking our power was cut…fortunately it still turned out edible. Our colleagues are wonderful, and it was a joy to spend time with them.


THURSDAY: Busted out a jar of Trader Joe’s pumpkin butter at breakfast. Yum! (We’d brought it with us from the US.) Since we had no Thanksgiving meal plans, I decided to brave our oven and make some cookies after work. It’s a gas oven that you have to light by poking a match through a tiny slit in the oven floor. The temperature gauge used to be marked (in degrees Celsius) but after an over-enthusiastic cleaning by the guardien a few months before we arrived, only the highest marking remains (265), and the rest of the dial is completely blank. So it’s one big Celsius guessing game. Also, the glass front and heat-proof handle of the oven door have vanished somewhere along the way, so you can’t open it with your bare hands. The cookies turned out really tasty though – peanut butter and chocolate. I had six of them for dinner.

FRIDAY: We ate Thanksgiving leftovers for lunch! Late Thursday evening Ann and Ray K. and their kids had stopped by on their way home from a fancy Thanksgiving feast at the Peace Corps area director’s home. They had been invited to this dinner since April and hardly knew the hosts, so they couldn’t very well invite us. But they dropped off a huge tray of leftovers, including some apple pie. We enjoyed turkey, rice, corn, green beans, carrots, and mac & cheese. It was delicious!

So all in all, we experienced the elements of Thanksgiving over several installments: lots of food preparation, a big meal with friends, yummy dessert, and Thanksgiving food. We managed to make the cookies last ‘til Monday night, and only just polished off our pie on Sunday…ohhhh it was good!