Sisters photo shoot

Here are a few shots from a recent photo shoot we did with Alia and Anna wanting to capture some pictures of them together.



Whoa, Anna . . . her endurance for taking pictures came to an end.



Drummer Girls

So Jason, being a drummer, can't help but get his daughters interested in drumming . . .

One of Alia's favorite pastimes with her Daddy is turning on some music and getting out the drum sticks and drumming together on the floor.

Sacrifice Holiday

Last week was a three day holiday in which families who are able buy a lamb or goat to sacrifice in memory of the sacrifice that God provided for Abraham in place of his son.  Some people had bought their sheep months before to fatten it up and others bought it the week before.  We heard increasing sounds of sheep sounds in our neighborhood the week before.  On the first day of the holiday the sheep is sacrificed and then meat is given to the poor, to neighbors, and then cooked up to serve to guests and family who come visiting. 

We wanted to participate, so bought some mutton from the bazaar and I cooked up a mutton soup to serve to any guests who would come over.  In this culture, lots of oil floating on top is yummy, so I tried to make it their way . . . see below.

Beginning on the second day of the holiday, people go around visiting each other's houses and at each place they are served some meat along with a big spread of nuts, fruit, cookies and cakes.  Our spread in our newly decorated guest room is in the picture below.

Usually most of the visiting is done by men during these three days because the ladies are busy cooking the meat, making tea, and washing dishes.  Jason went out on the second day to visit some of our neighbors and then we were grateful that a lot of them reciprocated and showed up later that morning.  In the afternoon, I was surprised when some of the neighbor ladies I had not met before showed up for a visit.  They invited me to go with them to visit some of the other ladies, so I picked up Anna and Alia grabbed the hand of one of the teenage girls and off we went with them.  These ladies were so jovial and a lot of fun.  At the second house we went to, suddenly a dust storm started.  The beautiful spread of nuts and candies began to get covered in dust coming in their window covered only by a curtain.  The ladies, obviously having lived through a lot of these, just laughed about it and got out a dust rag and began helping to dust off the table cloth on the floor.  It was a good reminder to me that laughing about the dust is better than getting stressed about it (which tends to be what happens when a dust storm is going on and I can literally see dust gathering as it comes through the cracks in our windows).  After visiting two houses with the ladies, the wind and dust had become so strong I could not keep my burqa on and hang on to Anna and Alia so I told the ladies I would try to visit more the next day.

However, on day three, we awakened to a huge snowstorm which dropped about 10 inches of snow, so no visitors that day!  There is a saying here though that the men's holiday is 3 days, but the ladies holiday is the next 30 days after that.  So a few days later I headed over to another neighbor to give her holiday greetings and I hope to make the most of these next few weeks when ladies are still visiting more than usual to go meet some more of my neighbors. 

And in the midst of it all, the question has come several times, "Did you sacrifice a sheep?"  opening the way to talk about our Perfect Sacrifice who is alive now and seated at our Father's right hand, making it no longer necessary to offer an animal sacrifice.

I wish I had pictures with some of the ladies, but whipping out my camera with them screams, "I am a foreigner!" and is not conducive to knocking down differences and presuppositions they have of me as an American, so . . . as occasions are appropriate, I hope to get some pictures of people, but just wanted to let you know why there are few pictures of our local friends here.

Decorating our Guest Room

So decorating a house has never been something I enjoy doing or am good at.  In this culture, families have a special guest room that is where they entertain guests when they come over, and this room is the most nicely decorated room in the house, usually with nice floor pillows, nice carpets, and nice curtains.  Many of the guest rooms that I have been in are decorated in red/maroon.  However, when I began asking my local friends if red was the best color to make my guest room, they told me that red is really out of style now . . . an old color.  The new colors now for guest rooms are pastels--pink, lavender, light blue, mint green.  Hmm.  So after trying to take notice of a few of the newer guest rooms in people's houses, I noticed several pink ones.  However, I just could not bring myself to decorate in pastel pink, so one of my friends told me that she had been in two new brides' guest rooms that were in light blue.  I decided I liked that color.

So I bought fabric for our floor pillows (toshaks) in light blue and then asked a local seamstress/friend to go shopping with me to pick out curtain fabric to match.  Now in Tuna Town, I have to wear the burqa when I go out, so you can imagine trying to look at curtain fabric through a tiny little piece of fabric mesh over my face . . . not easy.  I noticed my friend would pull her burqa up when her back was to the rest of the store and men could not see her face so that she could get a better look at the colors and patterns.  She convinced me of a blue flowered pattern and then in looking at a curtain catalog in the store I saw a style of curtains I liked that I had recently seen in a new local home.  The man at the curtain store came and measured our windows and told us he would sew the curtains and have them ready before the upcoming holiday.

Next, I had this seamstress friend sew the covers for the floor pillows, and then was the day to stuff them.  She and two other ladies came over for this process of weighing the stuffing in order to evenly stuff each pillow, beating the stuffing with sticks to fluff it, stuffing the pillows, and then sewing them up.  It was a day and a half project.  Below are some pictures of it.

Alia had a blast playing in the stuffing



Weighing the stuffing with a balancing scale . . . on her right



Alia giving it a try beating the stuffing with sticks



This was Alia's role model, Jaime, on how to beat the stuffing.



The picture of the final result is in the next post about our holiday.

Pumpkin Pictures

So the pumpkins here are not the pretty orange ones like in the U.S. but we decided to get some pumpkin pictures with the girls in our yard.  And we wanted to give you a little glimpse of our beautiful yard with lots of roses and flowers.  This is a wonderful gift from our Father in a place where due to drought and unrest, so much of the natural beauty has been destroyed!

First Post

Welcome to our blog!  We hope that this can be a place where we can share more family stories, cultural things we are observing, and other fun things that don't all fit into our updates.