Leading up to Christmas...

After the school nativity play, Esther broke up for her long summer holiday and then over the next week, we had a couple of other events to get us ready for Christmas itself.

On the Tuesday, we had a Christmas meal at home together with our househelper, Jane, my language helper Margaret and Gadi, who works a couple of mornings a week in our garden, growing some veg for us and making sure the plants and weeds don't get out of control.

Andrew was unable to join us, as work last week saw him flying with the Masai up in the north of Tanzania, but Esther, Ben and I were able to celebrate with our Tanzanian friends at a mixed-culture lunch.

We started with a traditional Tanzanian dish of "pilau", served at times of celebration here, which Jane cooked for us all. It is a mixture of meat, rice, potatoes and vegetables, with a slightly curried, onion/garlic sauce:

For dessert, I couldn't find what was needed for a traditional British plum pudding, so I cooked a fruit cake with the left-over almonds, cherries and sultanas from my Christmas cake and served it with custard, which was as close as I could get to a real British Christmas pudding! Thanks to kind friends, we also had some UK Christmas crackers and napkins, posted out from Lancashire, just to add a British flavour. Our Tanzanian guests had never seen crackers before, so they caused much laughter as we pulled them open at the start of our meal and everyone dutifully wore their paper crowns with good humour right to the end of the meal, except for Ben, who was a bit tired of all the Swahili beng spoken and more reluctant to join in the festive spirit!

Later in the week, we hosted a Christmas Evening at our home for the few of us who are left here over the Christmas period- many from MAF have gone away to visit friends or family or just to get away for a few days and really relax away from the work environment. There was a Christmas quizz with prize for the winner and for an international flavour, we asked everyone to bring something traditionally Christmassy from their home culture (or as close as you can get with what is available in Dodoma). Our buffet was very interesting, with Tanzanain pilau, Ugandan matoke (savoury banana) and groundnut sauce with meat, Swedish meatballs, American Christmas cookies, South African fudge from Claire, my UK Christmas cake (although minus the marzipan!) and a French-style pizza!

Snowmen in Tanzania?? only on the cake, just so that we can think of you who are over there in a cold and snowy England at the moment:
It was a lovely evening and to my great relief, quite a lot of rain fell in the last week, reducing the temperatures and giving the evening a cooler feel, so that all of us together in the one home did not mean that we were all overheated, especially with 9 very excited and well-fed children charging about the place, in and out the lounge and bedrooms!

Our get-togethers here are usually very international. Andrew (who returned from work up north just an hour and a half before the guest arrived!) with some of our guests, representing Germany, Sweden and the USA: