Rwandasgiving

So for thanksgiving in Rwanda I was just going to stay at my new site and continue to meet people and make friends but then I had a great idea. I bought 20 cents worth of sweet potatoes which gave me about 7 large potatoes and I decided to try to make sweet potato chips. So I cut the potatoes into thin circles and fired them in oil. They were amazingly delicious I just had to share these chips or no one would believe me. So I took a trip to Musanze for 2 days of back to back of Thanksgivingness. Day 1 consisted was instant thanksgiving derived from instant foods from America. We had stove stop stuffing with canned chicken (instead of turkey.) There were instant sweet potatoes with mini marshmallows form Betty Crocker. We made guacamole dip for my sweet potato chips. There was canned cranberry sauce (or more like jello). And we made a salad with some fresh veggies and white wine vinaigrette dressing. It was just me and my 3 closest friends here in Rwanda. It was a great day 1 of thanksgiving. The next day was the huge thanksgiving dinner at another NGO house in Musanze. Over 30 people came including Rwandans to come celebrate their first thanksgiving. 4 turkeys were killed the day before. The turkeys are very skinny so not a lot of meat came off them. There was a brie appetizer which was devoured in less than 10 minutes. Everyone grabbed a fork and stuffed themselves with brie, no plates or cracker needed. Then for dinner everything was made from scratch. One of the volunteers’ mothers was visiting from America and brought ingredients for thanksgiving with here. We had real sweet corn, mashed potatoes, gravy, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, cheesy onions and salad. For desert we had 2 pumpkin, 2 apple and 1 cherry pie. The only thing missing was mac and cheese but apparently that’s only an Alexander family tradition. There was no football but there was the movie Kill Bill projected onto the wall like a big screen TV. There were speeches at dinner and everything but luckily we did not have to go around and say what we were thankful for, we were much too busy stuffing our faces with real food that we hadn’t had for weeks and months. Happy Thanksgiving!