Thanksgiving

I just spent my third Thanksgiving in Cameroon, and it was the best one yet! This year we got a group of volunteers together in the beautiful town of Bangem, which is nestled into the Menenguba Mountains, featuring twin crater lakes. We had quite the haul, from collective care packages, and a certain volunteer recently returned from a trip abroad. We therefore had brownies, cinnamon swirl cake, m&m cookies, pumpkin pie, chocolate pudding pie, stuffing, cranberry sauce, gravy, mashed potatoes, marshmallow yams, greenbeans, biscuits, salad (with ranch dressing!), quinoa, and hot wing sauce. Not necessarily your totally traditional Thanksgiving spread, but certainly better than anything we could imagine! 

We had a local mama make a chicken for us, and it turned out pretty great. To top it off, one of our favorite local Cameroonian beers was “winning” (Cameroon beer is owned by the Cameroonian government and its beers go through a cycle of offering customers the chance to win a free beer simply by looking under the bottle cap for the image of a beer, in order to promote beer sales, which is one of the few things that is taxed in Cameroon). We invited some Cameroonians over as well to participate, and while they did not enjoy all of the dishes, they clearly enjoyed some of them. We ended the weekend by hiking up to the lakes, hopefully burning off some of the Thanksgiving meal.