First Thanksgiving

'Quiver,' David's new hedgehog

It certainly does not feel like we are entering the holiday season here. That is--to a great extent--due to the lack of change in weather. More precisely, the weather has actually become warmer, albeit wetter, and everything is turning greener--not drying up and dying.

But even more than that, I think the absence of commercialism or even acknowledgement of Halloween, and most recently Thanksgiving, makes this time of year seem less like the increasing crescendo of Holiday activities moving in a frenzy toward Christmas that we were getting used to again in the US. On the good side, some of the excesses are absent as well.

We did manage to wrangle an invitation to an American Thanksgiving dinner, although it was not quite like any I have been to in the past--probably because it was packed with people, most of whom I did not know. 

Truck we drove behind on the
way to Thanksgiving dinner

Thanksgiving is not a holiday here (obviously) but after work and school last Thursday our family went to the house of Dr. Mark and Linda Jacobson. They are medical missionaries associated with the Lutheran church. He is the founder of the Arusha Lutheran Medical Center, a large hospital in Arusha that does amazing work. Interestingly, they are also both MPH graduates of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and were students of my father! (They were surprised to find this out--and he had visited us just a couple months ago.)

The Jacobson's Thanksgiving party has been a decades-long tradition and is open to most any American who is looking for a place to celebrate this distinctly American holiday. It is done potluck style, and it brought together over 60 people by my estimate. There was all the expected food--turkey, stuffing, many pumpkin pies and potato dishes, (although not much in the way of cranberries). The festivities began after 5 and went well into the night.

We left sometime after 9pm, and felt like we had at least whetted our appetites for turkey for the near future. On the way home, what would have otherwise been an uneventful drive to our compound in Njiro, became exciting as we neared our gate. My headlights caught a small animal crossing the dirt road. It looked like a mole and I told David to look (since he is an animal lover.) Then Rebecca said excitedly "It's a hedghog!" By this time I had stopped nearly right at our gate and David jumped out in time to see it run under a bush...then back out the other side. He reached out for it and it curled into a little ball of quills. David picked it up and took it to the house.

For the next several days the hedgehog slept during the day in David's closet and ran around in the living room at night. David gave it slugs and hotdogs which it seemed to fancy. There is an old playhouse outside our house that we turned into a little enclosure over the weekend. We have been watching it to be sure it does not look sick, but it seems quite healthy and surprisingly friendly. It seems content to let David pick him up. David has named it Quiver.

Having a pet for David is a good thing because we are not allowed to have a dog on the compound. David was supposed to get a hedgehog from some people who were leaving when we arrived, but it escaped the day before we got there. He is thrilled to have a pet at the moment.

Besides Thanksgiving, the work week was fairly busy even though I never left town. We had a team meeting on Tuesday, so our whole team was together for the day to go over MCC business. Zoe was in town from Longido. The rest of us live in Arusha. (There are 3 Tanzanians, and 3 North Americans working at our office.) We celebrated a double Birthday at the end of the meeting for Neema, our Program administrator, and Zoe.)

Thursday was also a busy work day with a meeting of MCC's Advisory Board. While we weren't part of the whole full-day event, we did have lunch with the advisory committee and then presented some of our projects in the afternoon.

The rest of the week was more normal, although Black Friday is not a holiday here so we were at work for all 5 days. We are still enjoying our Wednesday evening choir practice and have been working on a difficult Magnificat by Stanford, as well as the Pentatonix arrangement of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah-- which is kind of doo-wop. It's got a new Christmas text now. (I am singing baritone and also doing some of the beatbox effects).

HAPPY belated THANKSGIVING!

Bonus Photo: Kids at our church singing Father Abraham for the congregation. 

(David is in the back row.)