The Heskas in South Sudan: Thanksgiving in South Sudan

We started planning for Thanksgiving a few weeks ago when our Canadian friends and teammates from Malakal sent us a package of “Kraft StoveTop Stuffing”. After that, each trip we made to the market we’d keep our eyes out for items we wanted for our feast. When we saw potatoes (which aren’t always there) we bought some. When we saw pumpkins, we bought one. But we couldn’t find any turkeys or chickens, only the typical beef and goat.

Since we will be working on “Thanksgiving Monday” and since Sundays are already very busy for us (with church and then team meeting), we decided to make Saturday our “Thanksgiving Day”. When Joyce (our Sudanese friend and GTC co-worker) found out that we were looking for a chicken she said, “I was planning on giving your family one of my chickens. Do you want to come over Saturday morning to get it?” Once again we were overwhelmed by the generosity of our Sudanese friends!

Karen (and Rachel) spent Friday morning making buns and roasting pumpkin seeds. Saturday morning they made pumpkin chocolate chip cookies while I went to Joyce’s house with a couple of the boys who live on campus.

The buns

Yummy pumpkin seeds

Rachel stirring the pumpkin chocolate chip cookie dough

Here are some pictures of us capturing and preparing the chicken.

German went into the chicken coop and captured the chicken. Then we slit the chicken's throat.

Joyce poured boiling water over the chicken so that the de-feathering process would be easier.

Here we are pulling out the feathers

I came home, put the chicken in the fridge and Karen told me she was thinking about making something like a cranberry sauce with hibiscus tea leaves. When I reminded her that we had some dried cranberries from Canada, she experimented and made some great REAL cranberry sauce.

Cranberry sauce

It was a busy afternoon using our little convention oven and 2-burner electric stove but we (and by we I mostly mean Karen) successfully cooked the chicken, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, corn, stuffing, and gravy. As Rachel would say "Yummy in my tummy!"