Happy Thanksgiving!

The group minus 3, and minus the Guatemalan at the end :)

Our T-Day "family" that evening

We were bored and decided to make up "Guatemalan Interpreted Dances" I won, haha. It was really stupid, but I acted out giving birth, breast feeding and having "my baby" on my back. I was representing all the women who have babies here and their "phases" of child bearing.

Well.... Thanksgiving has come and gone. As much as I was missing all the traditional T-day food, my fellow PC friends and I were able to make do of our version of a Guatemalan Thanksgiving. We were able to hash out stuffing, sweet potatoes, corn bread, mashed potatoes, apple pie, rice, veggies.... and turkey!! Yes, we ate turkey :) My friends Ferney and Phil bought a turkey and to the best of their ability, plumped that sucker up. I remembered a story my mom told me when she lived in Peru. She told me they would feed their turkey beer to help marinade the meat before being slaughtered. Well before I could actualy find out the logistics to this new phenomenon my friends called, they started months before Thanksgiving.... come to find out that my mother's family only started 3 days prior... lol. Well, the turkey had the ride of his short lived life, one that he probably never remembered :) The turkey was a nice 13 pounds. The turkey was sent to the bucher and then my friend gutted and sewed up the turkey herself... gross. Another reminder we are in Peace Corps.

There were 10 people that came for this dinner.... by the time we were about to serve dinner, there were 25. While we were preparing dinner everyone was enjoying wine, relaxing, excited to eat "American Food" and earlier that day Ferney invited his host family for dinner. Well when you invited someone's family, you invite your WHOLE family. Let's just say the wine kicked into a lot sooner and we were all quietly freaking out that we didn't have enough food. We put out heads together and told ourselves we would probably not be eating dinner tonight... much our dismay. If I wasn't laughing so hard at this sudden change of scenery I might have shed a tear. I whipped up a famous American Tradition called Onion Rings.... the thought behind this was that they wouldn't know and it could serve as a plate filler :) Everyone manned their stations: turkey, rice, salad, potatoes, veggies, gravy, rice, onions rings and we formed our very own "Thanksgiving Soup Kitchen". Instead of "this is so good, what great turkey, pass me some more potatoes" you heard "salad me!, turkey me!, rice me!, that is way too much gravy!, we are missing a potato person!, where is my wine?!" Needless to say given our circumstances, we all ate that night, and we were all stuffed! It was totally the story with the boy with 2 fish and 5 loaves of bread! God was good :)