Mandy's Journal -- Ugandan Thanksgiving

Nov. 23 – Ugandan Thanksgiving

I love holidays especially Thanksgiving. What a special time to be with family, making traditions, eating stuffing and pumpkin pie, football, snow…so much to be thankful for. Being in a foreign country for an American holiday can be difficult. I wanted to make it special and normal. Angie and I invited any expat that didn’t have a place to go. Everyone was welcomed to celebrate with us. We ended up with 11 adults and 6 kids and 1 baby. So we began preparing. The challenge with Thanksgiving in Uganda is that everything comes from scratch and substitutes need to be made. Wednesday I sent my house help to market for chickens – four of them. She was busy all afternoon slaughtering them, plucking feathers, and cutting them up. That is something we don’t do in MI. (Where is Meijers when you need it?) By evening we had two 9x13 full of chicken – testicles and all. I spent the day making three dozen rolls and two pumpkin pies from real pumpkin. (Never did that before.) We had quite a feast come Thursday – sweet potatoes, mash potatoes and gravy, sweet corn, chicken, stuffing, pies… I really enjoy hosting a special party like this. We had one big table topped with candles cut into gords. It looked so nice and festive. Everyone was so thankful to be there and to have a “real” Thanksgiving. I was thankful to look around and see friends from the Philippians, the UK, Uganda, Australia, Canada, and America. God is so good! The table is always big enough for God’s family. We had such a nice day. There wasn’t snow and we were far from America but we were blessed!

Well I guess that is all for now…because we are going to MI! I’d call it vacation but we are also speaking. We will be with family though and get to celebrate so much with them. We have four days til we go to Kampala then fly out the next day. We are in packing and putting away mode. I just hope we remember to do everything we need to before we go and take what we need to. Thanks for praying for all our traveling. You can be praying for the girls. They get motion sick, it is a long plane ride, and an 8 hour time change. We love you all and will see you soon!!!