Matt and Leah's Blog: December 2010

So Nigeria does have butter ball turkeys, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, corn, pumpkin pie and apple pie. Leah and I stayed in Abuja for the Holiday to just catch up on things and relax. We were able to attend a Thanksgiving feast with a lot of other teachers and school staff with families. One of our co-workers has a stash of balloons that you twist and bend to make swords and funny hats. So he brought those to the party and we started making hats for all of the kids, which was a lot of fun. Afterwards we went to our neighbors apartment and played a game similar to catch phrase. It was guys first girls and it was ugly. The girls beat us every time. They would get a word like flu and then our team would get double hung windows. (Matt is exaggerating- their team just wasn’t as good) It was a lot of fun and an enjoyable to relax and have such a huge feast.

Thanksgiving weekend we also had an opportunity to go to a German compound for a Christmas bazaar which was a lot of fun in that they have a shipping container with ac and warm spiced wine. It was probably upper 40’s or so in there but it felt so cold it was great!! We had wurst with bread. They also had different ice tables and chairs for people to use which were really cool to see. Doesn’t compare to Jon Ciatti’s 2010 Ice bar with Christmas lights in it, but it was still fun.

The temperatures here are in the 90’s today is supposed to be 97 degrees. We haven’t had any form of rain now for at least a month and won’t until February for sure, most likely it will be march when we see rain again.

Cool things that have happened since Thanksgiving:

We got a Christmas tree!! Our first one. We went to this market to buy a tree and because we are white we asked our neighbor’s Nigerian cook to come along and help us buy a tree. Leah and I are never really sure how much we are getting ripped off when we buy stuff from a market. Often the vendors will jack their price up two to three times what the selling price would be. So we get to our market and ask about this little waist high tree. The guy tells us that the tree is 25,000 naira which is about $170.00. We couldn’t believe what they guy wanted so the cook said we should go to a different spot because this guy is way off base. We walk down the road 200 meters and find a nice little Cedar tree (they don’t have pine trees here) and ask the guy how much a similar sized tree cost. He asked for 1,000N and settled on 500N which is about $3.50. We bought it back home planted it in a bucket and decorated it. We hope you like the pictures of it.

We have gone or done different things with the orphanage three times. We went there last Saturday and had a blast playing with the little kids. I had my camera and they all wanted to see it and take pictures of others. We had them come to our school to scrimmage our 8^th grade soccer team. They killed us 5-0 which was really good because our team has told me they don’t need to run and they don’t think soccer is a team sport! Surprise it is! While the older boys were playing soccer Leah took a bunch of the girls and younger kids to her classroom and made some Christmas decorations with them. One boy is Joseph , 1.5 years old, went hog wild in Leah’s classroom. She teaches 4^th grade and doesn’t have her classroom baby proofed. He was grabbing scissors and anything he could get his little hands on and running all over her room. Anytime Leah would take something from him he would throw this huge fit. He would drop his body to the floor screaming and yelling. Leah said it was something else.

Yesterday we went with the orphanage to the children’s park and zoo which was interesting. There were some really cool things and then some really sad looking animals, but we saw African Buffalo, wilda beasts, crocodiles, a huge tortass, one giraffe, a couple Zebras, and some other animals. Leah was giving me crap and saying we don’t have to go on a safari anymore! Don’t worry we are still going. There was this really cool rope structure that I’m going to have to build someday back home because it was so cool. You’ll know what I’m talking about from the pictures.