Happy Holidays?!?

Hello hello!

It’s the holiday season already! I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around the date, it can’t be December yet, it’s still August right?!

Last week for Thanksgiving some of the volunteers from my province and a few special guests spent most of Thursday and all of Friday doing our best to recreate a traditional Thanksgiving using a Cambodian kitchen! On Saturday all the volunteers from my training group had a meeting in Battambang so we celebrated Thanksgiving Friday night.

Thursday we created our game plan and figured out what we would need to buy from the western store, and the markets for our menu. We also had 3 big frozen Turkeys that the Peace Corps staff graciously tracked down and donated for our dinner. They were being held at one of our favorite restaurants in town until it was time for us to start defrosting and cooking. Then it was off to the market to buy all the green beans in sight.

Thursday we prepared TONS of pasta salad, brownies and sugar cookies. We ate rice noodles for dinner and ate the many brownies and cookies that were deemed too ugly to give to other people.

Friday we woke up bright and early and had a delicious pancake breakfast and got to preparing apple crisp, green beans, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, pumpkin delight, and of course the turkeys!! 3 turkeys in one tiny little oven was quite a feat but we did it and the turkeys were all cooked and even tasted good!

I’ll try and upload some pictures later but right now the internet is too slow.

Three little Cambodian kitchens, 7 people, 1 oven, 18ish hours and 30 kilos of potatoes later we had our thanksgiving! It was great to see all the other K4′s for the first time since swear in. The meeting lasted all weekend and it was nice to catch up with people.

Monday morning I had my site visit from the program manager for the health education volunteers. I met with the Operational District director for all of the health centers in my area and then the Peace Corps drove me home to meet with my family and health center staff. I’m not having any problems at site and my family and staff are great so it was an easy site visit. It was really nice to come back to site after being in town for 5 days.

And apparently tonight is the first night of Hanukkah! (thanks Uncle Steven!) At dinner I told my family a very abbreviated version of the Hanukkah story and tried to tell them that we eat latkes or anything fried to celebrate. I told them what goes into latkes and my host mom mentioned she is going into town tomorrow so I will keep you posted but if potatoes and onion appear I am going to try my hand at making latkes. Can someone email me a quick recipe so I can get the ratios correct??

That’s all for now, I hope everyone had a very Happy Thanksgiving and a Happy Hanukkah!

Love,

B