Thanksgiving for our neighbor Silas' recovery

In this community, when someone is ill and recovers or graduates from school or any other significant good thing happens, the family puts on an event they call a "Thanksgiving". They host a meal and there are prayers and speeches of gratefulness. Neighbors and family members bring small gifts of foodstuffs or other bits of money.

As mentioned in the earlier post "The Day of Grace", we took his two wives the two hours up to town to visit him during his nearly two weeks in the hospital.

Last week, we participated in the family's "Thanksgiving" event. I went early to join the party of 10-20 women cooking out under the trees for the meal (causing a great stir with my little metal veggie peeler, as I always seem to do). Doug came later and joined the men sitting under a bigger tree some ways off chatting and drinking the tea that the women served them.

After various speeches, prayers, and songs, the local pastor called the whole family into the center of the people and a prayer of blessing and thanks was prayed. It was moving to see all the family members trickling into the middle together, big married brothers, down to siblings and grandchildren less than a year old. These big families with multiple wives and multiple generations living together don't follow the "rules" of age that we are accustomed to in the U.S. uncles grow up as "brothers" with nephews, all women are called "mama", and etc.

Entrail cleaning and washing the tea cups. I was served these same special animal parts later and managed to get one small piece down with the help of a bite of potato!

The cooking event is one full of socializing and lots of fun carrying on. And I've noticed there's plenty of food sampling and tea drinking, too. As my father would have said, "Don't muzzle the ox that treads out the corn."

They felt I needed some dressing up and put a borrowed belt and beads on me. In the left background you see dough balls for the deep fried chapati. I helped form these and roll them out for a few hours.

These guys wanted a picture of them drinking their tea on their motor bikes (oltukutuk).

Three of Silas' older boys.