Thanksgiving in Botswana

Yesterday was the first Thanksgiving we have hosted together (side note: today is our 2nd weddding anniversary). We co-hosted the event with our friends Kim and Luke and ended up with 20 people total for dinner. Once we moved all the furniture out of the living room, we had room to set up 2 long tables.

We have the only airconditioned kitchen in the Embassy housing pool, and since the high yesterday was 98F, it made sense that we would host the event. Our first guests showed up an hour early at 3:00 instead of 4:00 but we were on schedule and were happy to have some time to catch up with them while we finished the last minute prep activities.

Dinner turned out quite nice with all of the traditional Thanksgiving foods...some slightly modified because you just can't get the same stuff here (for example, there's not a can of sweet potatoes in the whole country so you use the variation of yam that's closest to the sweet potato that you can get here and add a lot more butter, cinnamon and sugar for flavor)...everyone who came brought a dish and just like Thanksgiving should be, we had way more food than any group of 20 people could ever eat.

Cool side note: we ended up having a true Thanksgiving celebrity at our house. One of our guests was the daughter of the man responsible for the turkey pop up timer. How about that!

Thom making the buttermilk biscuits

The Perfect Pumpkin Pies

Thanksgiving is an American holiday. It's celebrated in Botswana only by Americans. It makes it a little more meaningful when you are the minority celebrating the day here and you know all your friends and family back home are also celebrating the day. That's not to say that an American Thanksgiving is a complete mystery here. About a week before Thanksgiving 7.5 kg Turkeys appeared in a freezer case at one of the bigger name shops and a letter was sent to the American Embassy apprising us of the recent development. There were a lot of questions from local staff just how we prepare a turkey as it is not a food that is normally eaten here and certainly not as a meal that is looked forward to.

Thom's favorite Thanksgiving tradition is to require everyone to say at least one thing that they are thankful for. As we went around the room, we realized just how blessed we are. As we reflect on the day after Thanksgiving, here are some other things for which we are thankful:

• good food and good friends
• being able to stay in touch with friends and family back home through modern technology
• pourable buttermilk (a Thanksgiving miracle!)
• the electricity stayed on the whole evening
• lots of leftovers in our house including 2 leftover dressing balls ("left over" by a combination of luck and sneakiness)
• our fantastic maid Lucy who did all the hard cleaning up on Friday and helped put our house back together again
• the Botswana adventure

Victoria Falls - 2008

October 31 - November 3, we went to Victoria Falls. This was Thom's second trip to the Falls and Debra's first trip. We were traveling with friends from the Washington, DC area: Mandy, Joanne, Sue, and Ruth.

As we may have mentioned before, traveling outside of Botswana is never simple. Victoria Falls is on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe so to see the Falls, you have to go to either Zambia or Zimbabwe. State Department still has a warning to avoid travel to Zimbabwe so we went to Zambia and followed the same route that Thom took in January 2007.

We flew to Kasane (2 hours from Gaborone). We were met by a tour company called Wild Horizons that took us by van to the border (about a 20 minute drive). We filled out our paperwork and cleared immigration at the Botswana border and then drove just a little further to the river -- The Great Zambezi River. At the river we were met by a small speedy boat that took us across the river in about 5 minutes. Then we had to deal with locals trying to sell over- priced trinkets (including a Zimbabwean Billion Dollar Bill) to stupid Americans. After that we had to clear immigration on the Zambia border. And another van took us the rest of the way to our hotel -- about an hour drive.

We stayed in Livingstone, Zambia at the Zambezi Sun. It was a nice hotel but it had too many monkeys. Seriously, we watched one monkey eat all the french fries right off the plate of a guy sitting at a table next to us. And breakfast was quite the show with the waiters also running off the monkeys that were trying to steal everyone's food.

The water level at Victoria Falls is at it's lowest right now. The rainy season stopped around April and we've only had a few showers since the beginning of October. So the water was very low at the Falls.

OK...it wasn't quite that low. We saw a lot more canyon than what you see most of the year, but there was still a lot of water a little further down closer to Zimbabwe than where we were.

For a comparison of the Falls at high water level, refer to Thom's blog entry from 2007: http://hotswana.blogspot.com/2007/04/victoria-falls-part2-wow.html

More photos of our adventures at Vic Falls can be viewed at shutterfly: http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=8AbtWzhs0bt3tw

And now our ending sunset photo, sunset on the Zambezi River: