Christmas in Tchad
Here is the story of my Christmas in my new home. It was a great Christmas. Unfortunately it has been a while now since those grand days and I am so full of all my other stories that I am having trouble remembering all the excitement of the days gone by! But I will do my best to tell the stories. . .
Sunday found us with great unbelief that Christmas was just a few days away. It was a little hard because our Christmas spirit had been so used right after Thanksgiving in putting up all our decorations that by the time we actually got to Christmas we had forgotten a bit and the decorations were a bit familiar and no longer exciting. Come Monday I was a little reluctant to go home to my hut because we had just been talking about how we missed home and all the Christmas excitement there. But home I went, and when I got there I saw how my Ama had been working up a storm!! She had been cooking these peanut cookie/fried things. They were great. I saw here sitting in the hut with all these platters surrounding her full of the cookie things to fry. It was so nice. I felt the Christmas spirit then. I saw her prepping everything and it got me excited.
We had planed out ‘missionary’ family Christmas feast for Christmas Eve after Sarah and Sarah/Esther got off work at 3:00pm. One thing that’s nice here is around the fete season there are not a lot of patients at the hospital. Things go really really slow. So we had lots of free time to have fun at the hospital. Okay, so the reason we didn’t celebrate Christmas on Christmas is because the Sarah and Sarah/Esther had to work the regular shift that ends at 3 and Liz and I were on the night shift from 3pm to 8am, so we prepped for Christmas on the Eve, just like a good ol’ New Englander.
On Christmas Eve we all got together supposedly at 3:30 but in typical African fashion, we didn’t actually sit down to eat till 4 (but I guess that’s just typical American in Africa fashion because Africa fashion would have been about 5ish.). For our meal we had great American food that was sent to us by loving people back home :o) I had to peace out temporarily in the beginning because of my famil's prep that was going on at the hut! Which I will tell you about a bit later. After our luscious meal we toped it all off with a beautiful cheese cake with cherries on top (thank you LLU med students!!!) It was so sosososososos good! Then we had our rousing game of White Elephant. I love that game it is always so fun, well I guess it’s not actually a game it is a gift exchange. I put in my gift a bunch of things that are for spa. It was some shaped soap that my mom sent, chap-stick, temp tattoos, some scented salts for a bath (or a hot bowl of water to sniff), eye cover from Air France, ear plugs and perfume. It was a lovely little package. Liz ended up with it. It was a boring round until James and Sarah (the last number) stole a bunch of gifts so we all had to pass some stuff around. I ended having my body cream lotion that Liz brought stolen, and I got this lotion with perfume and shampoo from Sarah. It was a nice lotion, Vanilla bean and perfume, lavender. I was happy with it but it sure would have been nice to get the other lotion . . . funny thing was when Esther and I were talking a bit later I let her try out my lotion and I tried out her lotion –we both had lots of smells on us. Then she wanted to trade!! Yippee, yippee. I got the great smelling lotions after all! I smell good now, its okay don’t worry.
Then everyone peaced out and it was all the sudden the four of us and George, Wendy and Gary who made it back for Christmas with his family. (Wendy and Gary are the pilot family.) We made an Africa version of Balderdash, we cut out all the word powers of the Readers digest and played with them. It was fun and we had some great conversations and realizations. You know how games can go when you get groups of crazy SM’s together.
Sunday found us with great unbelief that Christmas was just a few days away. It was a little hard because our Christmas spirit had been so used right after Thanksgiving in putting up all our decorations that by the time we actually got to Christmas we had forgotten a bit and the decorations were a bit familiar and no longer exciting. Come Monday I was a little reluctant to go home to my hut because we had just been talking about how we missed home and all the Christmas excitement there. But home I went, and when I got there I saw how my Ama had been working up a storm!! She had been cooking these peanut cookie/fried things. They were great. I saw here sitting in the hut with all these platters surrounding her full of the cookie things to fry. It was so nice. I felt the Christmas spirit then. I saw her prepping everything and it got me excited.
We had planed out ‘missionary’ family Christmas feast for Christmas Eve after Sarah and Sarah/Esther got off work at 3:00pm. One thing that’s nice here is around the fete season there are not a lot of patients at the hospital. Things go really really slow. So we had lots of free time to have fun at the hospital. Okay, so the reason we didn’t celebrate Christmas on Christmas is because the Sarah and Sarah/Esther had to work the regular shift that ends at 3 and Liz and I were on the night shift from 3pm to 8am, so we prepped for Christmas on the Eve, just like a good ol’ New Englander.
On Christmas Eve we all got together supposedly at 3:30 but in typical African fashion, we didn’t actually sit down to eat till 4 (but I guess that’s just typical American in Africa fashion because Africa fashion would have been about 5ish.). For our meal we had great American food that was sent to us by loving people back home :o) I had to peace out temporarily in the beginning because of my famil's prep that was going on at the hut! Which I will tell you about a bit later. After our luscious meal we toped it all off with a beautiful cheese cake with cherries on top (thank you LLU med students!!!) It was so sosososososos good! Then we had our rousing game of White Elephant. I love that game it is always so fun, well I guess it’s not actually a game it is a gift exchange. I put in my gift a bunch of things that are for spa. It was some shaped soap that my mom sent, chap-stick, temp tattoos, some scented salts for a bath (or a hot bowl of water to sniff), eye cover from Air France, ear plugs and perfume. It was a lovely little package. Liz ended up with it. It was a boring round until James and Sarah (the last number) stole a bunch of gifts so we all had to pass some stuff around. I ended having my body cream lotion that Liz brought stolen, and I got this lotion with perfume and shampoo from Sarah. It was a nice lotion, Vanilla bean and perfume, lavender. I was happy with it but it sure would have been nice to get the other lotion . . . funny thing was when Esther and I were talking a bit later I let her try out my lotion and I tried out her lotion –we both had lots of smells on us. Then she wanted to trade!! Yippee, yippee. I got the great smelling lotions after all! I smell good now, its okay don’t worry.
Then everyone peaced out and it was all the sudden the four of us and George, Wendy and Gary who made it back for Christmas with his family. (Wendy and Gary are the pilot family.) We made an Africa version of Balderdash, we cut out all the word powers of the Readers digest and played with them. It was fun and we had some great conversations and realizations. You know how games can go when you get groups of crazy SM’s together.
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