Each year we host our foreign students to an early Thanksgiving Dinner at our Leader's Club. This is a real turkey dinner, with mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, yams, and home made pies (among many other home made goodies).
We begin by telling the students what that first Thanksgiving was all about. We have an invocation and follow that with a song, Come Ye Thankful People Come. I really wish we had a better song. Not many people are familiar with that one, I'm certainly not, and I've attended a variety of chapel services from Episcopal to Baptist and that's just not one I remember either growing up or from any recent hymnal. In fact, it reminds me of a creepy movie and I have no idea why!
Then we serve the dinner. Now we had 180 people in attendance but we serve this family style. Though it's at a club, there is a more informal connotation only with no kids table and no Uncle Joe telling off-color jokes in the living room. So at all of our different tables we had the opportunity to tell the guys from Turkey, Greece, Jordan, Saudi, Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Slovenia, Thailand, Morocco, Senegal, Korea, Belgium, Hungary and Canada to "please pass the turkey."
My dinner partner to the right had just arrived from Saudi two days ago. Well, not actually Saudi. He had come from Texas where he spent nine months at the language school in San Antonio. In a way that is unfortunate because they come saying how great San Antonio was, and then Fort Knox is a bit of a disappoint, and cold right now to boot. In our conversation I asked if he was staying in Kentucky through the holiday break in December, but he said no, they were headed to Florida to warm up!
After dinner a chosen group of foreign students puts on a Thanksgiving play. We have the pilgrims depicted on their hard journey to the New World. And their meeting with the Indians, and finally the first celebration of Thanksgiving. Some of them are given lines that they deliver with great accents and some prompting, but it always supplies hilarity for the audience.
My friend Abdullah was there with his two boys. But the Saudi spouses were conspicuously absent, though it is understood why.
I dragged the Beaver with me, though he was not thrilled. He surprised me by speaking with the Saudis at our table, but he bailed on us right after dessert, so he missed the wonderful performance!
1 comment:
Last year we ate with our minister and his wife and her class of esl students, most of which were from the dominican republic. It was a lot of fun, especially to see which foods they liked and disliked (they didn't really like the turkey or green beans but the all loved one of the casseroles, sweet potato maybe?). This year our home group is supplying food for the a group of international students next weekend but we aren't staying to eat with them so it isn't quite the same.
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