Thanksgiving...Only Comes Once a Year

Happy Thanksgiving!!

It’s crazy how fast time goes by. Today Thanksgiving...tomorrow New Years. Before I know it I’ll be heading back to school and Africa will be a large collection of memories and pictures (most of those being Neil’s:). Well my time spent here has given many things to be thankful for. Like the fact I haven’t gotten malaria or any other strange illnesses. I’m also quite thankful for something that hasn’t happened yet...our upcoming trip to Mozambique. We leave here two weeks from today and after five days finally arrive at my parents’ house in Maputo. The train ride has me particularly excited. Maybe I won’t like the idea so much after having done it but who knows?

Last Sabbath was my turn to teach Sabbath school. The whole teaching, leading out in discussion thing isn’t exactly my piece of pumpkin pie. I mean I definitely enjoy talking and discussing ideas with people but the ‘in charge’ part is what gets me. Despite all that it went pretty well. Thanks in a large part to the fact that some members of the class enjoy enlightening others with stories of their past;)

I don’t know if I’ve talked about our pet, Frank (RIP). We had wanted a pet here so when we found a praying mantis in our kitchen a month ago we named him Frank and he became our pet. We figured this would be beneficial to both parties because he would get to eat mosquitoes and have the honor of being our pet and we would have a pet that could keep us company while cooking and just look cool. He hung out for a couple of weeks and we would find him all over the kitchen. Pretty much a “where’s Waldo” kind of thing. His favorite spot ended up being our compost bucket so we had to watch when we through stuff in there or outside so as to not injure dear old Frank. Then came the fateful day. The lady that takes care of the guest house where we live was doing some cleaning and decided to be nice and take out our compost. Poor Frank went out with the bucket and didn’t come back. It’s taken us a while to get over that tragic loss. For a while at just the mention of the name Frank, Neil and I would burst into tears. Imagine our joy when Neil saw a praying mantis on the outside of his bathroom window. I escorted the new Frank into our kitchen and set him up in a comfortable spot near the window. He doesn’t look like the old Frank but he still has the charming praying mantis manners. I’m going to have to look into the airline policies on bringing pet praying mantises into the U.S. for when we go home.

Note: For those who don’t quite know when I’m being serious, some parts of the above paragraph are exaggerated, slightly, to protect the integrity of the story.

Tomorrow there are a bunch of head honchos from the States showing up for some meetings here this weekend. They leave on Sunday and then Monday there are 18 others from Tanzania that are arriving to have some year-end meetings. Due to the large number of people coming on Monday, Neil and I are going to have to move out of our rooms and spend a couple of nights at a pastor’s house. Should be an interesting weekend.

Well I’ll probably write once more before we leave for Mozambique. I’m going to go prepare a little Thanksgiving feast of foods not native to Tanzania. Have a wonderful holiday season! And listen to lots of Christmas music because it’s been shown to increase brain function in 75% of the mice that were subjected to it continuously for one month.