Tanzgiving

Coffee trees are in bloom in the yard, Arusha Christmas fair is here and it’s getting hot….must be time for American Thanksgiving.

The coffee trees are absolutely beautiful right now.  I can do with out all the June bugs (they call them Christmas bugs or caramel bugs here), but I’ll take the beautiful green grass and flowering coffee trees. 

  Since Thanksgiving was really just a regular day in Tanzania and the kids had school we all decided to celebrate on Saturday instead. The kids and I started the day at the Arusha Christmas fair (Matt went for a long mountain bike ride). For the Rochester folks, it’s the Tanzanian equivalent of the Park Ave fest…crafts, food, music, etc.  I must admit to being slightly disappointed.  I was hoping to see some very unique and different crafts here, but it was mostly the things we can already get.  That didn’t deter me from spending money though.  I did get some fun Christmas ornaments, bags made by a women’s group and a ceramic pitcher. The kids also had a great time at the ISM tent where they could get their faces painted and jump in the jump castles, etc.

  After a little rest we went to our good friends’, The Foley’s, house for swimming and traditional dinner.  I got off easy and only had to make the mashed potatoes.  It was a full feast:  turkey, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, stuffing, pie and wine…oh, and Sangria.  Yeah to Charles’ Spanish heritage for that nice treat!  I love that we could swim before dinner – not something we get to do in Colorado before Thanksgiving dinner.  Matt definitely earned his meal with a 4 hour mountain bike ride that morning and then swimming with the kids. 

They have a beautiful house with gorgeous views of Mt Meru and sometimes even Kilimanjaro.  The rain threatened, but instead we were just treated with nice views and a rainbow.

We joined the Banks’ family tradition and each added a leaf to the Thanksgiving Tree noting what we were thankful for this year.  

It was interesting that both girls wrote that they were thankful to God this year.

 

 

 

 

 

A lovely evening with great friends and great food.  Thanks to Lara and Charles for hosting all of us orphans this year.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Unrelated to Thanksgiving, the kids decided that they wanted to dress up like ‘movie stars’ (a la Fancy Nancy) to go out to dinner on Friday night.  Here is the outfit that Anderson came up with.  Matt used his best persuasion skills to remind Anderson that this outfit might not be the best choice for going down the slide and swinging on the swings.  Anderson did eventually agree to change into more appropriate playground attire.  (I still think he looks cute though)

Hopefully our power saga will come to an end this week.  We’ve been having daily power outages (Saturday’s lasted 30 hours) without any back-up.  Our batteries were sent to Dar Es Salaam for replacement over 3 weeks ago with the promise that they’d be back in about 4 days.  Matt stalked the delivery company yesterday hoping that they’d show up before he had to leave again this morning to no avail.  The good news is that 3 of the 4 batteries arrived this morning.  I am cautiously optimistic that the remaining battery shows up and we can again have lights at night and not have the water run out anytime the power is out for more than a few hours.  We’ve been enjoying the evening bath by candlelight, but it does start to get annoying when we can no longer use the toilets..I think it’s the first time in my life I’ve seriously wished for a pit toilet out back. 

I know Thanksgiving is now over and the holiday rush is on.  We are missing you all very much right and send our love to all of you, but especially to those that are really needing it right now.  We love you.