Thanksgiving!

Last Friday (the day after Thanksgiving), about ten volunteers from the region got together to have a deeelicious Thanksgiving feast here in Danli. Although no one else from my training group lives nearby, I´m really lucky to have fun and welcoming sitemates, so it was fun to be with them for the holiday. Everyone brought one or two things and we ended up with enough food to last for several meals. We had all the Thanksgiving traditional foods except for stuffing: turkey (20 lbs), mashed potatoes, gravy, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, green salad (made by me but including fresh greens from the hosts' garden), cranberry sauce, squash, apple pie, pumpkin pie, and homemade rolls. Sadly there was no pre-turkey pasta--maybe that's a tradition I'll bring here next year. The day was pretty typical in that after dinner we played board games and took naps on the couch…No snow, and parades on TV--but we did joke about setting off fireworks as is the tradition here to do on national holidays.

I was definitely sad to not be with my family on this holiday, especially because we have kept the same tradition of going to Buffalo for so long. I did talk with my family and Aunt Jer and it sounded like it was a wonderful time. Here in Honduras they have a very traditional Christmas meal, so I tried to explain my homesickness for an unusual holiday by relating that aspect of the holiday. Truth be told while Christmas is always a great holiday, my family doesn't actually have any specific food we eat every year, and we celebrate with other families as well. So missing Thanksgiving for me really was hard because we have almost never strayed from our great tradition.