Thanksgiving in South Sudan

The Bountiful Buffet

 We celebrated Thanksgiving with our team on Tuesday with a bountiful potluck of all the major traditional trimmings you'd expect back home. Several times during the day I had to remind myself where we were because our menu included: stuffed roasted duck, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, bread rolls, green beans and several other vegetable dishes and for dessert: cheesecake, pumpkin pie, fudge, pumpkin pecan cake and chocolate cake!

Of course before I could fill my own plate with food, I walked around capturing this epic Thanksgiving meal on my camera and as you can tell there was quite a lot of dust in the air. So though it kind of spoiled my photos, I am just pretending they are snowflakes. :)

Family Dinner

Eli filled his plate!

 And then on Thursday, we joined our Uduk friends in the refugee camps for their traditional Thanksgiving celebration. Their food preparation was a little different than ours but we enjoyed it all just as much.

Ladies grinding sesame and peanut butter

Cooking for the multitudes

 Eli spent the day with the men, the kids with the youth, and I was with the women and babies. My favorite part about Thanksgiving here is that we are always reunited with many friends from our Yabus days more than 6 years ago!

As always, I'm happiest with a baby in my arms

One of the friends we were reunited with delivered a new baby girl a week ago so as we went to visit her since they are required to stay inside for the first 40 days of the baby's life. Before praying for the new baby as we were leaving, our friend Mary asked us to name her new daughter (who was child #7). My teammate Ruth suggested Grace or Nayma in Arabic. What a treat to meet this sweet little baby but also have the honor of giving her a name that will hopefully be significant in her future.

Naming a new baby