Day 86: Thanksgiving Nov. 24th

While most Americans will never work on Thanksgiving for their entire lives, I broke my own streak of 18 years today. Kristin and I had decided that I was important to finish what we had come here to do, and thus, would work on Thanksgiving to make it happen. The remaining work was planting and improving the fence. The only crops we planted were sweet potatoes, of which we planted almost 450 m²…

Planting was not really my favorite activity, but I consented to doing a few rows. Instead of planting seeds, we planted actual sweet potato plants that had been grown and cut from another farmer’s field. (I’ve taken so many pictures in the past couple weeks, so once again, I’m going to defer to my photos.)

After a busy morning, we returned for lunch and a nice rest. Daniel, a Full-Bright student arrived at around 3 with the rest of our materials. At 4, I went back to the field (Kristin didn’t come in the afternoon), and we installed the rest of the drip tubes. We watched the sunset, ate watermelon at the field, and walked back for dinner.

The girls and Rich had spent most of the day preparing our Thanksgiving dinner in solar ovens. We had brought the solar ovens to Nder when we came, and they have been used to teach the women to cook more nutritious food with less oil. Today however, they were used to cook potatoes, squash, etc. (no turkey, which in my opinion was basically sacrilegious…)

At around 8, we (the Americans and some of the Senegalese) had our Thanksgiving dinner, sitting on the floor in Rich’s room. It was pretty good, I ate loads of the garlic mashed potatoes…it was certainly quite different from any Thanksgiving I’ve ever had (or probably ever will have.)