Happy Thanksgiving to you all! I'm in Mtwara with a bunch of other PCVs, celebrating the holiday on the beautiful beach. We had quite the feast on Thursday, complete with turkey!!! Here's how that goes down,
Tanzanian style:
1. Find a turkey...they're not so common
2. Pay for a turkey...50,000 shillings ($32) for ~8 lb turkey...about a week's pay for a PCV
3. Put turkey on leash and tie to tree until ready for the big event
4. Tie turkey hanging from tree
5. Cut off turkey's head
6. Drain turkey's head blood into bucket
7. Pull out feathers
8. Put in pan and marinate with butter, rosemary, and thyme
9. Bake for 2 hours at 425 degrees...thankfully a missionary couple living here let us use their
beautiful new oven for the cooking
The turkey was pretty small to feed over 20 of us, but we all got to savor a few delicious bites! Katie and I also used all the turkey drippings to make some bomb cornbread dressing and giblet gravy so it felt just like home! We had quite the tasty spread, only missing cranberry relish. It was all delicious!
Aside from Thanksgiving, we also got to celebrate a few other milestones together. Thursday marked me, Katie, Ghee, Leslie, and Will's 1-year anniversary of swearing-in as Peace Corps Volunteers and Friday our 1-year anniversary of arriving at site. There were also two volunteer birthdays (Ben's on Thursday, Katie's on Friday), so it was a fun few days!! And today the newest Health and Environment training class has site announcements, so we'll learn who else will be joining us down here in the deep n' dirty south in mid-December.
I'll be heading back to my village on Sunday, where I'll have some time to relax because school is finished for the term. Although we wont officially close the school until December 2nd, the students finished their exams this last Tuesday and I finished up all my grading before heading out for Thanksgiving. So I'll have a few days to relax before leaving on my next vacation...Mafia Island. Me and 4 other volunteers will brave the notoriously rough 3-hour boat ride out to the island (off the coast a bit south of Dar) to spend a few days there. It's currently whale shark season and we're going to swim with them (don't worry, I hear they've got little mouths and can't eat people).
Then I'll head back up to Dar for a couple of days to await my flight home to Austin on December 12! I CAN'T WAIT!!! It's been increasingly hard to think about much else, and it will be so so so great to see lots of family and friends and celebrate Christmas and New Years there. I've also been having really vivid dreams/day-dreams about various foods and I can't wait to go to my favorite restaurants and the grocery store and satisfy all my food desires.
