Thanksgiving

The kids from the other programs here get it easy. CIEE, the largest study-abroad program on campus, threw a Thanksgiving dinner for their students, featuring turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and apple pie. Our house had the choice of doing it ourselves or not at all, so naturally we took that as a challenge and decided to go all out on Thanksgiving dinner.

On Monday we invited everyone who works at our program, as well as friends and coworkers. Cooking started on Tuesday, and I worked on pie. I searched every grocery store in Accra (there are three, and they have pretty much exclusively white people in them at all times) for pumpkin, canned or otherwise, but to no avail. I did find granny smith apples, and Z found a canned “summer berry” mix that looked like it’d make good pie filling. Liz took pity on me and helped with the pie, because apparently she wanted pie that tasted good or something. This was good, because otherwise I’m not sure what we would have ended up with.

On Thanksgiving, Z went out to get a turkey, and we thought that there was some sort of “precooked” turkey available because he’d seen it. As it happened, it was basically turkey lunch meat in the shape of a whole turkey. Gross. We ended up buying a frozen turkey and started defrosting it at about 2, when it needed to be served at 6. I was excited, assuming that this would never happen and we’d all get tons of turkey for the next few days since our guests would be long gone by the time the turkey was done. As it turned out, the turkey fit in our microwave, defrosted quickly, and was tender and delicious.

We ended up with turkey, sausage-apple stuffing, green bean casserole, infinite mashed potatoes, fruit salad, sautéed vegetables, mushroom and chicken gravy, two apple pies, and a berry pie. Our guests all loved the food, which was great because previously most Ghanaians who have tried American food at our house or elsewhere haven’t been impressed. Dr. Williams, our program director, even came by, and talked about American football for much of the night, which made it a lot like American Thanksgiving. Three boys from Taryn’s school came as well and had a fun time making hand turkeys. Really, all of us college students had even more fun with hand turkeys.
After the kids took off, we busted out the alcohol, and ended up playing beer pong for most of the night, which is a hilarious thing to do in Ghana. Our security guard walked up to return his plate of food, saw what we were doing, and we were all a little concerned he’d tell us to keep it down or to not remove our closet door and use it as a beer pong table. Instead, he picked up a ping pong ball and sunk a cup with his first shot.