Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Merry Christmas!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas! I intended to wish everyone a Merry Christmas before Christmas, but my body had some other plans. I am feeling better now, though, and had a really nice Christmas here in Belize.

I stayed in my village with my host-family and spent a few days cooking, playing games and just enjoying having some time together. It is pretty much just a big family day here. My host-father is a baptist minister so we went to church on Christmas Eve about 9pm and it was supposed to end at Midnight, but we were there until 1:30am. The pentecostal church joined us and it made a total of maybe 40 people. After church we went back to my host families house for a Christmas meal (yes at 1:30am) of chicken caldo, corn tortillas, and I don't really remember what else right now. It was a really late night, but somehow we managed to be up early again cooking for Christmas day. The whole day was just a lot of cooking and games. Our Christmas meal here was BBQ gibnut, black beans, cole slaw and cake. A bit different than any other Christmas meal I have ever had, but it was good. Gibnut is a little bush animal, it tastes a lot like pork, but they hunt for it in the middle of the night in our village.

I attempted to get a family picture before Christmas, but it is hard to get 16 people together at once, so here are a few attempts with different parts of the family and just some random fun pictures: