Happy Birthday, Jesus!! Unlike our relatives in the mid-west who had a white Christmas, ours was green and a little overcast in the morning until the sun broke through haze. Absolutely beautiful weather!This morning, Emily, of course, opened her stocking and gift
from “Santa” and then she went over to Rossington’s while Mark went over to Bonvallat’s to drop off their “Candy Cane” bread and the gifts we brought them. We then enjoyed our bread with scrambled eggs and passion fruit juice mixed with plum juice. Of course after breakfast Mark read the Christmas story and then we opened our presents. It was a bit quiet and tidy but fun none the less.We then scurried around and finished up the preparations for Christmas lunch, which was actually much easier than in past years. Emily frosted the cake while Mark and I worked on shredding and chopping cabbage, carrots and onions for the salad I was making. I was told to make enough for 30 people so I made 2 huge bowlfuls. In the end I brought home ¾ of one bowl. I made too much. There was a lot of food there and a lot of kids. I don’t think the kids ate the salad but the adults did and some went back for seconds.
Well, at noon we went to the Bonvallats. They have a covered carport area that they don’t use as a carport but they had cleared it out and brought out chairs and small tables. The neighbors who were coming also brought furniture over. The floor of the carport was dirt so it didn’t matter when kids spilled coke or other items. I suppose the neighbors came around 12:45 and brought FOOD!
We had lots of rice, homemade French fries, sombe (manioc leaves cooked in palm oil), 2 kinds of ugali (or bugali or foofoo depending on the language): one made from corn meal and the other from ground manioc root. (I’ve been told that the type made from manioc is similar to poi but I’ve never been to Hawaii so I can’t verify that. ). We also had cooked green peas and carrots, a green salad and my cabbage salad. The main course was goat cooked on skewers. They called them brochettes. They were really good. I am not a huge fan of goat but these had a nice flavor and were very tender.Besides the Bonvallats and us, there were 2 Rwandan families who are neighbors of the Bonvallats. One family has 7 kids plus extended family and their kids. The other family also had several adults and kids. Everyone was introduced but I couldn’t keep them all straight. There were two adorable baby girls – one was Abbey’s age and the other about 9 months old. When the kids were finished eating, they ran off to play soccer or on the Bonvallat’s slide. The adults were boring and sat around and talked. In previous years there have been group games which included the whole family but this year some of the adults had to go off to a WEDDING on Christmas day! They said it was fairly common for Rwandans to get married on Christmas – especially the Catholics.
The preferred languages for the day were French and Kinyarwanda. Some of them also spoke Swahili because they had lived in Zaire/Congo at some point. We are finding a LOT of Rwandans have spent some of their lives in Zaire/Congo but mostly in the southern part, just across the border. We’ll have to tell you their stories later.
After cleaning up and saying goodbye to the neighbors, Gilles and Myriam invited us to stay for coffee which we did. In the evening we set up a DVD on the computer and watched a movie, “The Ultimate Gift.” It was interesting. If you haven’t seen it, you should watch it sometime. We then Skyped a lot of people! Very fun!
It was a pleasant way to celebrate Jesus’ birthday!
