jessicahutt - Jessica's Thanksgiving-in-Nicaragua Quiz

Please
take out a sheet of paper and a number two pencil. 10 questions, all
true-false, and all pretty easy so you should score at least an 80%,
which I will count as passing. There are no re-takes. When you have
finished, the answers are at the end. Unfortunately for me, you are
on the honor system for cheating. :)

1.
There were 20 people eating Thanksgiving dinner at El Puente.

2.
You can find turkey in Granada, Nicaragua.

3.
You can find pie crusts at Pali (the Central American branch of
Walmart) at any given point in the year EXCEPT the last week of
November.

4.
We had a recipe for everything that we cooked.

5.
I woke up at 4:00am.

6.
Random things during the day made me feel homesick.

7.
Our electricity got shut off before noon, while the turkey was only
half-cooked.

8.
We had no water for part of the afternoon.

9.
Nothing else interesting happened that day.

10.
It was a fantastic Thanksgiving and I wouldn't have traded it for the
world.

ANSWERS:

1.
TRUE. Our team + Heather + Pepe + Mario + Carlos + Mani. For Carlos
and Mani, it was their first Thanksgiving ever, and though the food
was pronounced "strange" I think they had a really good
time.

2.
Thankfully this is TRUE. It's a little harder to find, but not
impossible.

3.
Also TRUE, so we fudged our plans a bit. Apple pie became apple
crisp, and ayote pie had a crushed cookie crust instead. (Ayote is a
squash-like plant that tastes very similar to pumpkin; it was
delicious.)

4.
FALSE. Pepe and Heather used recipes, though they adapted the recipes
as they went along. Tana and I fixed the stuffing from what I could
remember of my grandmom's recipe, Annie made the ayote pie from
memory from the ONE time she had made pumpkin pie from scratch a few
years ago, and we all sort of winged the sweet potatoes, green bean
casserole, mashed potatoes, and gravy.

5.
TRUE, but I don't know why, because that was a full hour before my
alarm was set to go off! Oh well, it turned out that we needed that
much time anyway.

6.
Very TRUE. I think this has been my first Thanksgiving away from
home, and I definitely felt it. There were so many things to make me
think of you all back home - songs on the radio, smells while
cooking, getting an email from my family, and the little bit of
football I caught on the TV while at Heather's house.

7.
Thanks to Murphy's Law and a confusion with our electric bill, this
is TRUE. I was at Heather's house using her oven when it happened, so
all this information comes to me over the phone. Pepe took the turkey
to our neighbor Chilu's house to use her oven, and found that her
oven does not have normal temperature settings, either in Fahrenheit
or Celsius. No, it has the numbers 1 through 5 on it, and he had to
guess which was closest to what we needed!

8.
Thankfully this is FALSE. I can only imagine the extra measure of
chaos that would have caused.

9.
FALSE - now really, when have you ever known a day to go that
smoothly? Tana rolled her ankle at El Puente before the meal, the
taxi driver started laughing at Laura, Annie, and I when we climbed
in trying to balance two or three pans of food each, Heather tried to
iron her shirt while she was still wearing it, and after the meal
Heather, Jenn, Amy, and I took some leftovers to a woman named
Margharita who lives on Calle Santa Lucia, just around the corner
from our house. Oh, and as I type this, our electricity is (finally!)
being hooked back up after two days of waiting.

10.
TRUE.

I have much to be thankful for this year, and all of you as my financial and prayer supporters are pretty close to the top of the list. Without you guys, I wouldn't be here in Nica. Thank you for following God's will and being such an encouragement to me! I love you all.

See you in 3 weeks for Christmas!