Thanksgiving

We hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. It was a little weird for us, celebrating it without our families back home, but we did celebrate it with a couple members of our new Peace Corps family. At the last minute our friends Carlos and Andrea, who live about 2 hours northwest of us decided to come down and celebrate with us. We all went out to dinner the night before Thanksgiving for some cheap food (rice, sauce, and wagasi cheese—400CFA/.90 cents) and caught up.
We don’t have access to your typical Thanksgiving foods (except yams and potatoes) and since we’re all from regions with heavy Latin culture, we decided to make Mexican food. Carlos, Craig, and I all went to a garden that is run by handicaped people to buy our produce. Unfortunately, they sold us avocados that weren’t ripe yet so we couldn’t have any guacamole and the papayas that we had for our beverages weren’t all the way ripe either so it was a little chunky. Regardless, we had a nice spread. Home-made tortillas and tortilla chips, salsa, refried beans, Spanish rice, Tapatio potatoes, and the dessert—arroz con leche, or rice pudding while drinking frozen fruit daiquiris made with papaya, pineapple, and bisap syrup-made from hibiscus flowers. Sister Madeline (from a previous post) was in town and stopped by with a bottle of white wine for us to celebrate the holidays with and we had our neighbors over for the actual dinner part.
We ate all day long to make sure that something that day felt like Thanksgiving since we were without our normal company and it was extremely hot like usual. But while surrounded by new family, friends, and neighbors, it was the closest to a “normal” Thanksgiving that we would get to and it was really nice.

gutting the papayas for the daiquiris

the Thanksgiving gang

cooking away!

the finished product...or what would fit in the screen