Giving thanks for Thanksgiving hospitality – Sudanese style

The main project area I visited on Thursday was a remote village a drive of an hour and a half from the town of Yirol (I just don’t know how the Lutheran World Federation finds these places anyway; I think aliens identify them for LWF staff from their spaceships). I spent some time interviewing women in a savings and income-generating group. One of their new projects is running a shop. First they offered me a soda, and then when I asked the staff person who took me there if I could pay for it, he told me that it would be an insult to their culture if I refused something that was offered to me like that (which I suspected because I would probably be insulted too if they were visiting me in the U.S.). But I told him – and he translated it to the women, who understood my joke – that I felt like I should pay in order to support their new business, especially since that’s what we had just finished talking about. But I said I would graciously accept their drink, which the women said had not come from their shop anyway. When we were done talking, the women then offered to make me lunch. They had known I was coming and had already slaughtered a chicken (good thing I didn’t have to be one of their first customers the next day at the restaurant that they were opening next door, since the goat – still alive – had been purchased in preparation for the slaughter). So we walked around for a few minutes and then sat down and had a meal of stewed chicken with homemade bread.

I didn’t remember until we were driving away from the village that Thursday was Thanksgiving Day, and I realized that that was my Thanksgiving meal. It wasn’t turkey, and the main dish had only one trimming, but I thought to myself, “What gracious hospitality. It wasn’t a Thanksgiving meal like I had ever had before, but their gift, an offering from strangers, is something to be thankful for.” In the same way the Pilgrims had sat down with the Native Americans for a meal, I was hosted by strangers in a foreign country and was given a meal in their tradition. Again, it was a different meal than I would have wanted, but the unexpected surprise I received was Thanksgiving in the truest sense.