Tanksgivin

You may be wondering what a Thanksgiving in the DR is like. To be quite honest, it´s a bit strange. To start off with, the weather hasn´t changed much since I got here in June so it´s always a little difficult to grasp that it should now be cold and gray and time to eat some turkey. Also, they don´t sell turkeys in the grocery store around here so we had to find one, kill it, and slaughter in ourselves. Also, the only acceptable way to kill a turkey in the Dominican culture is no tear it´s neck out with your own teeth. So that was a bit interesting to say the least.

Actually those last three sentences were completely made up, started by Anthony as he was reading my post over my shoulder, and finished by me. Back to your regularly scheduled post.

Of course, Thanksgiving is not a Dominican holiday, and we did not get the day off, so in a lot of ways it was a normal day for us here in wonderful Cabarete. The only difference really was that we had a nice large meal to top it off. What was nice was that one of the other volunteers invited us all over to the resort where her parents were staying to have a nice group meal. A couple of them did a lot of cooking (including a turkey) and everyone else brought at least one item. I brought a bunch of rolls that I slaved over for 2 minutes in the supermarket isle. The meal turned out really well, and we had so much extra food that we took all the leftovers to one of the local neighborhoods to distribute. Here´s a few pics from the evening:

Candid shot of the post dinner scene

Harkening back to my post last week about being the only male volunteer around, here I am with some of my women.

Me and Rebecca. Here I am displaying my special talent for smiling on cue.

Caitlin in this year´s winner of the National Pie and Cider Association´s photo of the year contest