Thanksgiving in Dakar

I feel as content as I could possibly hope to be right now.  I just celebrated Thanksgiving in an apartment we rented in Dakar (for $50/night) and now I'm resting and eating and lounging about.

Wednesday I could barely focus on classes because I was too busy trying to figure out how we were all going to get the ingredients we needed and cook all our Thanksgiving dishes in time for dinner on Thursday.  Wednesday night, the plan was to make curried butternut squash and granny smith apple soup, applesauce, and pies.  We were missing ingredients for all those things by the time we were going to get started (and by that point all the stores were closed), so we just bought some apples from a local boutique and made the applesauce.  We finished at 2:30 in the morning and then woke up at 7:15 to go to the food market to buy what we'd need for the rest of the day.  By 9:45 we were back and ready to go.  We spent the entire rest of the day cooking, up until about 5:30 or 6.  By the time we finished, we had:
curried pumpkin and apple soup
stuffing (from scratch)
4 challahs
green bean casserole
turkey and roasted veggies
mashed potatoes and stuffing
yams
green salad
fruit salad
"cranberry" sauce (made by boiling hibiscus into "bisap" juice, which is common here, and then adding the flowers, some citrus, a little sugar, and some gelatin.  It really tasted exactly like cranberries, but there were none in it [or Dakar]).
applesauce
2 pumpkin pies
apple pie

The 8 of us, plus Dinah from the Baobab Center, plus our 4 usual Sene-boys, plus Katy's brother Amadou, ate until we could eat no more.  We managed to finish almost half the food.

We went around and video taped each of us saying (in French) what we're thankful for.  It was particularly moving because we had pulled off a beautiful, delicious, inclusive holiday without any of the resources we usually had.  We cooked all day without power or water, without enough knives (and they were all dull), without moms to tell us how to do things (like cut the head off the turkey?), without family to come and tell us how much they'd missed us since the last gathering.  Still, the sense of community was almost tangible.  Some of us teared up when we talked about what we were thankful for, and we all felt how much it meant to everyone to be together.  It was exactly what Thanksgiving should be, and I'm so proud of all the women in my program for being willing to take on such a huge task and pull it off with such grace and style.

I'm thankful for the fact that I have such opportunities in my life to do completely new and different things.  I'm grateful that I'm constantly given chances to take risks that allow me (and force me) to grow as a person.  I love being here, I love the women here with me, and it constantly amazes me that I'm finally feeling in my element in a country that I had barely heard of two years ago.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone everywhere.