All About that Food: Part 3

And even more food!

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Thanksgiving

I was blessed enough to have not one awesome Thanksgiving this year but TWO. 

The first was with my fellow PCVs at a regional house in Ndioum. Last year, I had one of my best Thanksgivings ever, with buckets of food (no, really, the mashed potatoes and stuffing were in huge buckets), dancing, and lots of laughs. This year was just as great if not better. It made me so happy to have 20 of us volunteers coming together, bringing different family traditions and dishes into a little kitchen in the middle of nowhere and using a one-temperature oven and one-temperature burners to cook some of the best Thanksgiving food I've ever had. It is the communal spirit that every Thanksgiving should be, the reason we have the holiday every year. Maybe being away from home purified the meaning of it for us; abundance is something rarely seen in Senegal, and we rejoiced in having an abundance of all the things we have given up here- speaking English, choices about what to eat, cooking for ourselves, wearing whatever we want, showers, and most importantly, our friends and our food. 

In my almost two years here, I have loved learning about and participating in Senegalese culture, especially holidays. Korite, Tabaski, Tamharit, and even Touba Magal have been a big part of my life here. So, naturally, I've been wanting for a while to give my family here that same gift and show them what an American holiday is like. I decided that Thanksgiving was the perfect holiday to recreate for my Senegalese family. It involves food, a story from America, and didn't conflict with any of their holidays. My friend Lindsay came to visit and help and I bought chickens (an impossibly rare treat in my village), brought cranberry sauce, peas, stuffing and gravy, and made instant mashed potatoes. A week before the "fete Americain" I told the families in my neighborhood that I was planning to cook them American food for the holiday. I printed out a coloring book story about Thanksgiving from the internet, read the story to my siblings and neighbors, and then had them color in the pages and give them back to me. Now, after almost two years here my language skills are fairly good. I can translate from Pulaar to English and back on the fly, I can express most ideas in Pulaar, and I can understand almost anyone. (Exceptions to this include trying to describe skiing and understanding the old men who mumble worse than your sullen teenager.) However, I doubt that the Thanksgiving story really got to my Senegalese family. Have you read a Thanksgiving story recently?

Explaining it to my family went something like: people from England came over on ships to America. England and America are not the same, they are across an ocean from each other. There were other people already there. They were Americans. Yes, they were brown. Yes, the English people are white, and now the majority of Americans are white. But not all Americans, there are Americans of all colors. Yes, there are Black Americans, yes they are real Americans, no, they are not just Africans on vacation. Just trust me, there are lots of different kinds of Americans. But originally it was these brown people. Now, the English people didn't know anything about farming or making food, so the Americans helped them. The brown Americans, not the white English people who would eventually become Americans, yeah. (For better or worse, I glossed over awful violence, terrible diseases, and centuries of racism in the interest of time.) And so they worked together, and they were able to make food and survive. And then the English people said thank you to the Americans and they had a party with lots of food to celebrate. And that is why today we eat lots of food and say thank you. Yeah.

I tried.

But anyways, they got that it was a holiday and it was a holiday for giving thanks. I collected the colored pages from the kids that week and then on the day of the celebration we read the story again in all its colored glory. Then we ate the food, which was prepared mostly by my counterpart and best friend Penda. She did an amazing job, more than I could have ever asked for. We gave out nine bowls of food to friends and neighbors who had come for the fun and I think they actually liked it. Most people ate almost everything (even the cranberry sauce!). I think the stuffing was the least popular, it proabably had too many unfamiliar spices. But, success!

This year, I pulled off making two thanksgiving dinners for about 20 people each and had so much fun doing it. I am thankful to my American family and friends for supporting me from afar, and to my family and friends here for celebrating with me and helping me every day.

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