The best Easter ever

So we had some challenges on Christmas, if you'll remember. Not one of the highlights in my past year, though I do enjoy laughing about it at times. But I tell you...Easter was wonderful! It started out slow, with trouble finding a goat. We see and hear them all the time, so we were totally bewildered at how impossible they were to find when we actually wanted to buy one. Plus we were trying to get the best price and passed up a couple early on thinking we could do better. We ended up not getting one until 1pm on Sunday (and paying too much...needing something automatically raises the price--they can smell the desperation, I swear!). Everyone had arrived around noon--all 21 people, and we visited and the 12 kids played on the new playground Chad built. I was so relieved when Chad arrived with the goat--I had no idea how I was going to feed everyone otherwise! The men went to work killing, skinning, and cutting up the goat while us women made greens, salad, goat stew, rice and nsima, the staple food here. I butchered the Chichewa language trying to talk to the women who spoke almost no English, and they laughed at my mistakes, at my poor attempt to shred cabbage with a knife, and at the fact that I only had bought 12 tomatoes, apparently not nearly enough. Who knew???

At 2pm I made peanut butter sandwiches for the kids, who were not complaining but I knew had to be starving, since no one had eaten since breakfast. They loved drawing on the driveway with chalk, and I sent them into the yard to find marshmallow-roasting sticks. As soon as the meat was done roasting, we toasted marshmallows--a new experience for them, and one that was a definite success! I called it 'roasted candy' since I had no other words to describe it in Chichewa.

At 4:30 the food was finally all done, and we sat down for a feast. It's a good thing people hadn't eaten all day--there was so much food it was amazing. As amazing as the amount of food on each person's plate!!! Everyone feasted until nothing more could fit in the stomach--picture the end of a very satisfying Thanksgiving dinner, only with us in camp chairs sitting under Flame trees in the African evening. Ahhh, it was next to heaven!

Chad gave a great 'speech' (in Chichewa!) about how much we appreciate each of the families who were there, and then they gave a speech about how much they appreciate us (I think--I was catching every 3 or 4 words, but between the words I did get and their big smiles, I think it was positive!) We had to bypass the egg hunt because of time, so we just gave the kids some candy and stickers and Chad drove them all home since night had fallen. As soon as we brought all the dishes in, the power went off, so we had to save the clean up for the next day. That gave Chad and me time to sit in our living room in the candle-light, thinking just how blessed we are to be living this life!