This blog was written on July 25:
This month, thanks to Imago Dei we decided to begin a new tradition sort of thing. It’s month seven, most of us are tired and worn down, missing home and need a little extra something to spice things up a bit. Determined to have a good time during our down time. Which lets face its, things move at slow pace here in Africa and on a much different kind of time than we do, so we found there to be LOTS of it. So every other week we had what we deemed ‘Family Fun Night’. The premise of the night is to have fun together as a team it could include a special meal, some games, a movie on a laptop or anything else we could come up with. This month we had some epic family fun nights.
Two weeks later we followed up with an equally awesome night celebrating Christmas in July!
Lyndsay, Auston, Eryn and Tanuska got their heads together and creatively planned a fun filled AMAZING
night. We borrowed a Christmas tree from our Pastor and we put white elephant gifts under it (which seemed like real gifts to us), wrapped in colored wrapping paper. There was all kinds of stuff including a mirror, snicker bar, a beanie with Obama’s name* on it, a notebook. a stick on tattoo, a hair pick, cashews, etc, you get the picture.
They also got used socks in town and made us our very own stockings. Each stocking contained a pen (highly sought after and stolen here on the race), a pack of peanuts, and a piece of obama strawberry gum.
After we played the game with the presents and opened our stockings we had half melted ice cream sundaes they had hid in the corner. There was even chocolate syrup and M&M’s! We found the bite size packs in town and we split one pack between two people.
We ended the night sitting around the tree sharing our favorite Christmas traditions and memories and singing some obnoxiously loud Christmas songs.
It’s fun to just be silly like this once in a while. I know it did wonders as far as lifting my spirits and making me a little less homesick.
