Birthday Fun!

I had some great fun for my birthday this past Dec. 11th.  I got to skype with my parents; received many birthday congratulations from many, many friends on Facebook; had some great gals who took me out to dinner; and had a night of fun with some K-nationals who came over to eat cake and fruit, brought me some presents, danced, and in general had a great time.

Although I had many favorite things happen that day, one of my favorites was that, after a little begging on my part, two little girls I love dearly put on a show for me:

I love, love, love how their father likes to spend time playing with his girls.  This is extremely rare in K-land, but these girls are blssed to have a father who cares about even the little things in their lives.

I am also fortunate to have both an earthly father and another Father who care about what's going on in my life.  I'd really like opportunities and language skills to share about this with the people I'm around on a daily basis.  I'm very thankful, especially at this time of year, for my fathers and the amazing gifts that they have given to me, especially the gifts of Siblings.  I suppose the best way to show appropriate thankfulness is to share What I have been given.

Bringing some Style to K-land!

So, I have decided that I have no shame, so why not show off my fancy winter duds?

These were given to me 2 days before I left NC as kind of an inside joke between me and the McAllister family.  If you can't tell what the print is on the pajamas, let me help you out:  cowboys and cacti.

The nice thing is, these guys are flannel and warm.  When your concrete house has no heating, it's kinda nice for your clothes to keep you warm.  Plus I have my matching pillow accessory!

Let's hope these duds keep me warm when January rolls around!

Quince!

 This is a quince.  (pronounced "kwins")

It's a fruit that I've heard of often in the US (because of my dad liking hard to find foods), but I'd never seen one until just the other day.  And I ate it too!  I hear it's the most expensive fruit you can buy here in K-land.  It's a kind of like a pear and kind of like an apple.  But it's also a little bit fuzzy like a peach.  Really, it's too sour to eat by itself, so I only got through half of it.  The family that gave me one to eat also gave me one to take home.  So I decided to make something with it:

 Applesauce!

We often have a lot of apples.  It takes a little bit of time, but I cut up probably 15 apples and that one quince and made some applesauce.  (Of course, the picture above is the "before cooking"picture).  In all, I think it ended up tasting pretty good.  But you know the best way to use a quince???

Quince jelly!

Okay, I didn't actually make quince jelly, but if I could, I would.  For now, I'll just dream about it.  Anyways, tomorrow being Thanksgiving, I think I'll have plenty of food to fill my plate.  As long as I don't end up in a  food coma, this blog will eventually get updated again.  Bye!

A visitor!

We had someone special come visit us about a week ago.  He brought us a few notes and goodies from the US, which we very much appreciated.  But most especially, we enjoyed his company.  We even made him climb the mountain with us:

We saw some goats along the way.

And, in general, we just had a good time.

E was incredibly uplifting to our spirits.  He even put his back into it:

But seriously, we really enjoyed our time with him.  We spent many evenings Reading with him, Remembering things with him, and talking about the general goings-on in K-land.  He was very very encouraging to us, and met a few of our national friends.  We got to hear a little bit about the things going on back in the states, and were really refreshed in our mindset towards our work in K-land.  It is always really nice to have someone encourage you.

Here in K-land, many things in our lives are changing or constantly adapting as we learn more about our work and how it is best accomplished.  Sometimes our job descriptions can change, where we live can change, our co-workers can change, the people with whom we interact can change, but it's nice to know that there is one Thing that never changes.  I just have to trust that that will get me exactly where I need to be.

So, for now, I feel my role in all of this is to watch and remember.

You've Got Mail!

A Dear Friend's Wedding

My dear friend and former language teacher, Jamie, just got married a few days ago.  Here are some of the pictures from her wedding events.  And I know most of you are about to ask whether or not I did her hair and make up for her wedding. No, I did not (as you will soon see that she had little need of a hair dresser because of what she wore.)

BUT, I did do her highlights 3 weeks before her wedding.  See???

This is Jamie and my roommate L on Jamie's Night of Henna (the evening before her wedding).  You will soon see where the henna is involved.

 Some of the bride's relatives on their rooftop:

When the groom's family arrives, it becomes, well, chaotic to say the least.  There's a lot of dancing and yelling, but only from the groom's side of the family.  All the bride's side stands back and just watches.

The groom's family only stays about a half hour, but, besides the dancing, they cover the bride's pinky finger in henna and wrap it up with money (and then a pretty cloth so the henna doesn't get everywhere).  

 PS.  All that gold is real!

After about an hour, the bride (and other guests that chose to put henna on their pinkies) will wash off the henna and her finger will look something like this:

Now we move on to the actual wedding day: The bride, one of her sisters, and two of her sister-in-laws headed to the salon around 1pm where she and they got their hair and makeup done, got dressed, and arranged Jamie's head scarf (called a dersuk) so that it wouldn't budge.  L and I accompanied them for this, and I watched closely to see some of the techniques that the stylists use.  Then L and I headed back to the bride's house to hang out with her family members:

 For many wedding events, they love to dress the small girls to look like brides too.  Hence the two sisters below had almost matching bride outfits.  They (and their brother) LOVED getting their picture taken.  I probably have 5 or 6 photos that look almost exactly like this one:

And finally, the main event:  The Wedding itself.  The groom came to the bride's house about 7:30pm with some of his family.  They tied a ribbon around her waist and danced and yelled some more as they escorted her out of her home.  Meanwhile, she and her family break down sobbing as they are "losing" their sister (never mind the fact they'll probably get to see her next week.)  The groom, bride, and all of the groom's family head to the wedding hall and spend the rest of the night taking pictures with the hundreds of friends and family members (of the groom's family, not the bride's) that come to celebrate.

I always remember Jamie and I hope that her new family will be kind to her and that they would be a group of people beneficial to her well-being.  I also am remembering L as she will be continuing language lessons with Jamie in a few weeks.  I hope that her language lessons will be profitable and truthful and that L would make some good relationships with the members of the groom's family.

The life of a woman in K-land

Well, as you might expect in a country like this, the lives of the women here are different than in the US.  It is very true that their lives tend to revolve around cooking and cleaning.  What you might not know is how much of a communal activity those things can be:

 We helped this family make special cookies for their upcoming holiday.  It is truly a family and neighbors event.  They started making these cookies around 8pm that night and didn't finish til 1 or 2 in the morning.  But they were okay with that.  During that particular time of the year, they were pretty much staying up all night and sleeping all day anyways.  Plus, it's much more pleasant to do hard work in the cool night air than it is to do it during the day.

Take regular household chores, for instance:

I hope you're glad you have a good vacuum cleaner!  A few times a year, we have to wash our rugs, and we do it by hand.  Recently, we hauled the heavy rugs and cleaning supplies up to the roof in the early evening and used a little elbow grease.  We finished when the moon was high in the sky.  Then we hung the rugs over the railing for a day until they all dried out.  (However, they were too heavy to lift back up, so we had to drop them down into our courtyard and carry them back up the steps to our living room.)

The nice thing about all of our work is this:  it almost always has to be a community activity.  And if it's a community activity, it means we get more involved in the lives of the nationals around us.  They like to offer help and assistance most of the time, and it shows them that we want to learn about the way that they do things in their society.  It also gives us opportunities to share about our own society.  Sometimes that means looking like we don't know how to do anything right, like a child that's never done a chore before:

But sometimes it shows them that we care about their lives and the way that they do things, that we could have tried to fend for ourselves, in our own ways, and we might have turned out fine, but we chose to involve them anyways.

Fortunately, when we chose to do things their way, it often earns us some merit for when we might want  to talk about a few of the things that we do differently.  We helped our national friends get ready for their holiday and we participated in visits for it and helped them ooh and aah over their new clothes and all the candy that the children got to eat.  At the close of one evening, I told one of our sisters about some of the differences between her and our main holidays, because we have a lot of things in common but many times, the point of the holiday is different.  Of course, our main holidays are based on what we have read, so that we can remember.  I think that it's always important that the point of the holiday is more important than the tradition of the holiday.  I like to remember what happened on the event for which the holiday is based so that I can better celebrate it.

Hopefully, when our holidays roll around again, we'll be able to be good representations of the main points of our holiday so that we don't confuse others based on some of our traditions that may not be in keeping with the reasons.