Our Ecuadorian Thanksgiving!

Sorry for the lack of posts lately! Adam and I were on the coast a few weeks ago visiting a volunteer and this past week was pretty busy for us running errands and such! Overall we are doing pretty well. There are some days where we feel pretty useless and don't feel like we are serving any purpose here. And when combined with a bad Spanish day (where we can't seem to speak coherently), it can get pretty tough. Luckily Adam and I have each other to talk to on a daily basis when we need someone to process with.

In other news, though, we had an AWESOME Thanksgiving. We had thought it would be hard to pull together a real Thanksgiving dinner, but in the end, that is exactly what we had! We were invited by a girl we met in Loja, Jamie, to a Thanksgiving dinner that she was organizing. It was a pretty large group of us- some World Teach volunteers, some English teachers, some missionaries and Adam and I. We had waaay too much turkey (we even got to bring home leftovers!), mashed potatoes, gravy (Adam did a good job making it!), stuffing, green bean casserole, sweet potatoes and rolls. Adam and I brought a pumpkin pie and an apple pie too. In total, we had 3 pumpkin pies and 2 apple pies...along with Baskin Robbins whipped cream and some homemade oreo ice cream. We were totally stuffed! And it didn't help that Sister and Elder Harrison (the older missionary couple that we met back in September) invited us over for some apple cobbler and ice cream in the afternoon too!

Adam's homemade apple pie (pre-oven)

Steven carving our 11 kg (24 pounds!) turkey that was amazing!!

Needless to say, we made a lot of gravy

Plenty of white and dark meat for everyone

My first serving...I did end up going back for seconds...and possibly thirds...=D


And this is only a handful of all the Americans living in Loja! (ok ok, 2 of the gals in the photo are Slovakian, one person in Ecuadorian, and one person is French, but still!)

There was a Thanksgiving gathering of Peace Corps volunteers in Vilcabamba, but since we had already committed to the otherThanksgiving dinner, we didn't end up going. But we did help Jason, the PC volunteer who lives here in Loja with us, with prepping the turkey and watching him make his cranberry cokaputzy (I have no idea how it is spelled, apparently it is Yiddish!).

Jasing putting canned cherries into his cokaputzy...but it was a much more arduous process because they still had their pits in them!!

Mixing up the canned cranberry sauce, since real cranberries don't exist here!

Early in the week we also worked with the kids at the orfanato and shared with them a little bit about the idea of Thanksgiving and how people usually celebrate the holiday in the U.S. (yeah PC goal 2). We made handprint turkeys and then on the feathers they wrote down things that were thankful for. The difficult thing is that kids here are so used to copying things in school (rather than being creative and making it their own) that a couple of the kids copied exactly what I had written down on my example...meaning that a couple of them wrote down that they were thankful for their esposo (husband). And they are old enough to read and understand what I had written down, but it was so automatic for them that it didn't register.


I hope everyone else had a fabulous Thanksgiving back home! And how did all those Black Friday sales go??? =D