Happy Thanksgiving. We all ventured out to the US ambassador’s home here in Bangui for a Thanksgiving meal. The highlight of the meal for me was an elaborate cake, with a pink and white color theme and beautiful cursive letters that proclaimed: “Happy Birthday Thanksgiving”. I make an effort on the farm to carry my phone with me so I can take pictures when the occasion arrises. Sadly I don’t have a picture of the cake. I can imagine the upscale cake shop with pre-decorated cakes ready to fill in the name of the special birthday person. This week we celebrated Thanksgiving.
Our Thanksgiving meal was what is now a normal lunch for us. We had salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, some shredded lettuce, and slices of avocado. Salad was followed by chicken and cream sauce with peppers, onions and carrots, red sauce with vegetables and fried plantains. I chose to have my sauce with Gozo, a rubbery, unappetizing ball of food made from manioc (casava) powder. However bland and bouncy its appearance, I love Gozo and prefer it over the alternative of white rice.
Desert is always what Charlotte affectionately calls “365” and what I think of as the greatest luxury of our life here. 365 is just fruit salad with whatever is ripe and in-season, this week we had papaya, passion fruit, pineapple, and mango, and it’s called 365 because it was the boring and often dreaded desert that was served to her and her brother every day of the year. I think it would take a few years of 365 for me to get sick of it.
Happy Thanksgiving.
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