Thanksgiving: Part 2

Happy belated Thanksgiving and happy start of the Christmas season! My Thanksgiving holiday kicked off with marketing for the Artisan Expo. Alyssa and I walked around downtown handing out flyers to restaurants, hotels, and businesses downstairs. The big coup of the day was when we walked into the European Union building and, using Alyssa's Wolof, convinced the guards to let us leave a flyer and a pamphlet. During the next week our awesome publicity materials should be posted on www.pcsenegal.org so check it out this week to see if it gets posted.

The night before Thanksgiving the 2nd year volunteers made chili and cornbread (which Alyssa and I made from scratch without a recipe and it was AWESOME) for the new volunteers. We all ate chili and had an awesome welcome party for the new Dakar region volunteers (they arrived in August so our party was a little late). We also voted on our WAIST costume theme... but I'm going to keep that a secret until WAIST in February!

On Thanksgiving morning Alyssa, Erin, Jackie, Brian, Tamar, and I went to Nicole's house to use her oven (there were a lot of people needing to use the oven at the regional house). We made an amazing breakfast with eggs, toast, bacon, and cooked vegetables. The rest of the day was spent hanging out and cooking, it was really great to have a real kitchen to use and be able to spend a relaxing time with friends. Brian made brownies and brownies with peanuts while the rest of us made a huge dish of squash casserole and another of homemade stuffing. After cleaning ourselves up a little (which I have to say we do well) we went to the Ambassador's and joined 40 other volunteers for an AMAZING Thanksgiving dinner. Everyone had brought a ton of sides, mashed potatoes, stuffing, salad, green beans, cranberry sauce, pasta salad, homemade bread, and a ton of other stuff along with 3 turkeys and desserts galore. It was so great to have a normal dinner and get a 2 hour break from our normal lives - it was a really holiday. After dinner some of us took a walk over to the Meridian hotel and got a nice drink before heading back to the regional house.

The next morning I was up and back to site! Yesterday I caught up with Matar about artisan expo things and took stock of the work he has left to do before the expo (Dec 11-12). The volunteer from Diourbel was in town with her counterpart so I visited with her for a few hours - they're doing interesting work with solar ovens and were giving a training in my town to try and sell them.

Today I had a girls' group meeting that, unfortunately, only 3 girls showed up for but we made friendship bracelets and I asked them some questions about the girls' camp to help with our planning of future camps.


Happy Holiday Season Everyone!
KO