The First Thanksgiving

Sarah and I came to the realization last night that this was the first Thanksgiving we've spent together, despite coming up on six years of being a couple. And perhaps true to our relationship, Thanksgiving this year felt anything but "traditional".

The week leading up to National Turkey Day* was essentially split evenly between managing hoards of children come to read the books in the Niamakoro library and salivating over pictures of Thanksgiving food. Needless to say, the monotony of eating the same three dishes here for months on end has led to some indulgent food fantasies. Did you know there's such thing as food porn**? It's too bad we don't get those cable channels here.

Sarah did an english lesson about Thanksgiving with the 9th grade classes during their time in the library last week, which involved some searching for pictures of Thanksgiving food, football, and good-ole' American family gatherings. We were highly disturbed by Google's auto-suggest. An image search for "family thanksgiving" suggested we may really be interested in "black family thanksgiving". *Facepalm*. We quickly found some pictures demonstrating the ideal Nuclear Family, which were probably photocopied from a Health textbook.

Thanksgiving day itself was very pleasant. The day was spent working on the project, where the children are still overly excited and arriving in unmanageable numbers at the library (we've had to institute the rule that if there are no seats, you have to wait until someone leaves). Then, in the early evening we had some nice Skype conversations with our families. There's something to be said for modern communication technology -- the fact that you can video chat with someone literally half-way around the world, from a poor part of one of the most under-developed countries in the world, is truly incredible. But it was nice to talk to them all, even as we lamented the fact that the oven smells weren't making it through the 'tubes. They must've been clogged.

Then, following a tradition that dates back to as early as the Mayflower, we proceeded into downtown Bamako for a Thanksgiving dinner of Chinese food. We could've attended a (rather spendy) ex-pat dinner hosted by the American Club of Bamako, but decided there was a certain poetry to eating Chinese food for Thanksgiving. It just illustrates the day-to-day absurdity of living in a foreign country. But thankfully, it was a tasty absurdity which did not consist of beans. Here are the lovely pictures to remember our First Thanksgiving.

 

-------------------------------------------

* Little known fact: the reason we eat turkey on the last Thursday in November is to commemorate the wisdom of our Founding Fathers and give thanks to the fact that the Eagle, not the Turkey, is our national animal. Thanks, Ben Franklin, for almost screwing that one up :)

** From the New Oxford American Dictionary: porn (n) - ... (2) Television programs, books, etc., regarded as catering to a voyeuristic or obsessive interest in a specified subject : The Food Network captures a delectable display of exquisite cuisine -- food porn of the highest order.