Grace in the Valley: Thanksgiving: part 2

Another aspect of our holiday preparations was that we still have no water in the neighborhood (for the past month) so we’ve been hauling water from further away via motorbike or a friend’s car. Wednesday night we did a water run which actually turned out to be a fun date for Orcxance and I as Esther watched the girls.

Unfortunately the power company cut all our wires and wouldn’t put them back even after we paid our electricity bill. What a rip-off. You can see in this photo where they cut a section off the black wire: it’s supposed to attach to the box. The thinner yellow wires were also cut.

Fortunately for us, Orcxance knows a lot about electricity so he was able to wire things back together each evening when he came home from work (so we’d have lights for the night) and then we’d wait each morning for someone from the power company to come fix what they’d done, with the power out in the meantime. We weren’t able to have electricity during the day for several days because of this issue. Thanksgiving morning was the same, hot without any fans.

Once all the food was ready, we laid it out on the table, leaving the plantains for last so they would still be warm, and the avocado salad so it would be cool. We also decided we liked the idea of chilling the pies in the fridge so we did that. We didn’t end up eating at the table, but spread out a liputa on the floor when it was time to sit down to eat.

We had invited some guests, but not very many because our budget would not allow us to serve a feast to a numerous amount of people. However, the plan was to make enough to at least serve dessert to anyone who showed up invited or otherwise. Hence the 3 pies and 4 pans of “pumpkin” bread. We invited some of the neighbor kids to come party and have dessert. Meanwhile we changed into nicer clothes and took pictures outside.

Despite our lack of clothing color coordination, I was very happy about getting family pictures and most of all thankful that we had Aravis with us in our family photo!

At one point when no one had showed up yet Orcxance stood on top of the sand pile and yelled for the our nearest neighbors to send their kids on over. I pointed out to Esther that this is probably what “going into the highways and byways” looks like.

We had a pretty large group of kids and after they played darts on the front porch we cut up pies and squash bread and gave everyone some.

Then Orcxance got the music going and moved inside for a lively dance party, complete with our Christmas moving light thingy (not sure what it’s actually called).

After everyone was tired of dancing we sent all the kids home with more dessert. Then we heated up our food, finished cooking the last minute stuff and settled down for our own Thanksgiving meal.