Thanksgiving, African Edition

First major holiday in Africa, Check.

Last Thursday, the PCTs of Namaacha celebrated a makeshift super-american holiday as best we could.  I’ll be totally honest, when we decided to do a 70-person potluck, I wasn’t sure how well that was going to go. But I have to say, it went amazingly well.

We started off the day as normal with model school. Since our classes were winding down, we had a review day (aka an intense game of jeopardy) and exams.  Helen, Emily and I taught all 4 classes together, and it was by far all of our favorite day of teaching so far. The kids were super into it, we had candy, it was all good. Then after lunch we all set off to make our dishes. After a failed attempt to make fruit salad ( I know what you’re thinking, how can you fail at fruit salad….well … the answer is that its raining and only the women selling bananas are brave enough to stay at the market. So unless you want banana salad….the fruit salad was a fail) we settled on “pasta salad.” Basically, pasta and vegetables…which was surprisingly good.

We also had something called a “turkey team.” Now, I was not a part of this team because, well, I just don’t like turkey enough to be on a team for it. Ha! Barbara – a volunteer in our training class who as taken on the role of loving grandma-figure  (she’s 71 and I have mad respect for her being here) bought us 4 turkeys. And when I say she bought turkeys, I mean live turkeys.  Then, with the help of some local teachers… some of the guys killed the turkeys, dressed them, and cooked them in a local bakery. It was a solid 2-day long event.

Did you know that when you kill a turkey, you need to give it red wine first? True story. I have heard multiple reasons. 1. That it makes the meat tender (source: fellow PCT) 2. That the blood will turn to vinager if you don’t (source: local chem. Teacher) 3. That if you don’t it could kill you. Turkeys are viscous and can kill small children (source: mama joana…this was complete with wild flapping of her arms to demonstrate)

So we had our feast and ate until we were uncomfortably full. At which point, we ate a little more. It’s pretty much a rule on thanksgiving, right? There was stuffing and green beans and salad and peanut butter cookies and apple crisp and turkey and gravy and lots of mashed potatoes. It was awesommeeeee