Friends, Thanksgiving, Advent and Christmas All in One

On Sunday we managed to squeeze lots of festivities into one day! We met with the Pentecostal Church in the morning (where Tim was preaching), then celebrated the first Sunday of Advent at home with a little service the girls prepared and finished the day celebrating American Thanksgiving! A little out of order, but nobody minded! We had Marc, a potter from the States, currently working at Neema Crafts, for dinner, which aside from the puny little chicken posing as a turkey, was fairly traditional! We even had cranberry sauce! I looked all over the market for pumpkins with no success, but we splashed out on apples and with a real North American apple pie, no one was complaining. Andy and Angela joined us for coffee and apple pie and the girls excitedly presented their shadow play “The Story of Kuang-li” which you should soon be able to watch from their blog! All the festive activity was thrown together rather quickly and a lot of fun in our brief two-days at home!

Enjoying some apple pie!

Early Monday morning we took the bus to Morogoro, to visit our good friends Matt and Amy Dixon who have just moved there from the UK. We arrived in time for a late lunch at Ricky’s, where they treated us to burgers! It was wonderful to see them again and meet little Finley for the first time! The girls thoroughly enjoyed playing with Elia, now almost three years old. It has been a rough start for Matt and Amy with one thing and another, but we are so glad they are in the country and excited about having them here with us in Iringa for Christmas! We commiserated over car problems and water problems among other things, enjoyed bacon butties and chats among other things, and then had to be back to the bus station for 12:30pm the next day.

Playing with Elia and all the babies

We got home at 6:30pm and then another quick turn-around for Tim who quickly unpacked and packed ready to go to Magozi at 7am yesterday morning. He gets back later today, but the girls and I have stayed here to sort some of the chaos of the past week and do some schoolwork! In all the excitement, we seem to have run low on all kinds of things such as food obviously, but also pig food, drinking water, electricity, phone credit … and we haven’t had time to go to the post office, where we hear there are five parcels waiting!

Later ...

Well after all recent niggling frustrations with things like the kettle breaking, the puppy chewing my new boots and pajamas, continuing failed efforts at the electricity company to top up our supply, failed attempts at getting internet, failure to get through the dishes and laundry (we are really missing Mama Lucy who has been sick!) we had the most wonderful failure just now! Failure to carry all the packages out of the post office!! The girls and I had been trailing around town, hot and tired with not much going as planned, when we had the most amazing, exciting visit to the post office ever! We knew we had five packages waiting for us and were already very excited about getting them! But to our amazement, we had a post box full of green slips (each green slip means a parcel is ready to be picked up) - TEN! The staff at the post office found the girls' uncontainable excitement very amusing as we waited for ages to get all the parcels brought and signed for. We signed for ten parcels and they all started coming, but further to our surprise, when we counted there were TWELVE! The woman made sure we signed all ten out, checked my ID and checked orally that I knew my name several times, and then a little confused with the extra two parcels, just handed those over as well! The girls were quite beside themselves and now can't wait for Daddy to get home and show him the pile of brown paper packages tied up with string! Talk about favourite things! Then curiousity will only grow as they wait till Christmas Day! We don't know who you are yet, but thank you so, so very, very much those of you who sent parcels! I wish you could be with us to share in the great excitement! I'll stop now as I'm getting all teary-eyed! Lots of love from all of us!

Christmas comes to Iringa!