Holiday Parties

Christmas Dinner

What started out as a joke turned into quite a wonderful Christmas celebration.

A couple of the staff here at Idigima Secondary School have chosen to raise goats to augment their income. As the goats are allowed to free range, they eat almost everything on campus. I started telling one of the owners that we will have to eat his goats for Christmas. He may have taken the hint, because he hired a village boy to keep the goats away from certain parts of campus where we are trying to grow decorative and shade trees, and watch that they don’t get into the farm crops.

As Christmas approached, however, teachers started talking about the dinner we were going to have. So, since nobody wanted to eat goat, we bought some chickens and delegated the cooking of rice and beans to the other teachers. In addition to the big pot of chicken pieces, Joanne made three banana cakes.

Not wanting to disturb the good celebration, Jacob kept quiet until the next day about his accident in bringing soda to the party from the village of Idiwili. The breaks were bad on the bicycle he was using and he tumbled. It is amazing the soda bottles survived.



He is mending well now after Joanne’s diligent attention and the First-Aid supplies sent with us by our faithful partners.

Starting three hours later than originally planned . . . or maybe everyone else thought that was the time to start preparing the dinner...we had a dozen teachers show up for the activities. We read the Christmas story, had a time of prayer, and enjoyed a hearty meal.

Afterwards, we cleared the tables and had an assortment of table games available.

Christmas Party games

Some students showed up in the evening. We rounded up some left-overs, played games, and watched a movie.

The teachers started talking about “the night of no sleep” and celebration of New Year’s Day. The generator was on until after midnight, with a lot of music and chatter going on in the houses, but we did not participate. We took advantage of the electricity for charging computer batteries and watching Lord of the Rings.

Students came on New Year’s Day to greet us and bring gifts of fresh-dug peanuts, mangoes, bananas and avocadoes. We received phone calls and text messages from some of our former students, wishing us a good New Year and continued friendship with the people of Tanzania - the very thing we are happy to do.

Living in the freedom of Christ,

Gary and Joanne Grenell