Harvest Festival

Last weekend we celebrated Harvest Festival, which is an annual event at Tenwek.  It helps to remind us that it's autumn back home and gives us an excuse to have a party!  I helped to coordinate the festivities again this year, which included a pumpkin-carving contest.  As it turns out, doctors (especially surgeons) are really good at carving pumpkins and the results are fun and impressive.  There were many pumpkins carved this year, by kids and adults alike, and this year we added an extra incentive by promising that the winner of the contest would get to throw a whipped-cream pie in Eli's face :)  Well, that was enough incentive for me to stay up until midnight carving my own pumpkin in hopes that I might win :)

But before I could work on my own pumpkin, we helped the kids with theirs.  They love carving pumpkins!  Well, at least they love scooping out the guts and picking out the seeds.  They left the carving to us.

Caleb was adamant about wanting a chameleon on his pumpkin.  Eli and I drew straws and it fell to me to carve Caleb's pumpkin, but in the end it turned out okay.

And then it was my turn: a Wizard of Oz pumpkin!  I carved Dorothy, the scarecrow, tin man, and lion around the pumpkin, plus the word OZ.  I was pretty proud.  We dressed up as characters from the Wizard of Oz for the costume contest (since the theme was Storybook and since we'd recently read the book to the boys), and so I wanted my pumpkin to match our costume idea.

Here are some other pumpkins that showed up.  It was so much fun!  It was a great start to a great night.

In the end, MY PUMPKIN won Best in Show!  There were a few judges and I was both surprised and pleased.  I promise you the competition was not rigged!  But I must admit that throwing a pie in Eli's face was the highlight of the night for me :)  The other person who earned the right to throw a pie into someone's face was my friend Jenny who won the costume contest, dressed as Amelia Bedelia, and she threw a pie into her husband Ben's face.  The "whipped cream" was not exactly whipped cream and was pretty soupy and apparently did not smell good, but it served our purposes here :)

But I need to back up.  Before the Harvest Festival even started, I was baking donuts.  Maple-glazed donuts.  Can I just say, mmmmmm.....  I have now made home-made donuts three times since living here, and it turns out that I am really good at it!  The only way to eat a donut here is to make a donut here, and since I couldn't imagine going two years without eating a donut I decided to learn how to make 'em!  I've done chocolate-glazed and maple-glazed donuts, and the latter was the perfect treat for an evening dedicated to making it feel a bit like autumn.  So after the pumpkin-carving contest and costume contest were done, and after hot dogs were consumed, people dived into these beauties and I received some great compliments.  They were a true hit since missionaries in rural Kenya don't ever get donuts!  I've really discovered the ministry of baked goods since being here, but that's another story :)

After the donuts were made, it was costume time!  I had the idea for Wizard of Oz, and Caleb was all about it because he wanted to be the lion.  Kai was not convinced of the idea, however, because he just wanted to dress up as Batman.  I gave him tons of options but he was not on board.  After a few days, though, Kai had the idea himself to dress up as the giant spider (which is a part in the book that didn't make it into the movie, when the cowardly lion finds his courage and saves all the forest creatures from the spider).  Cha-ching!  The Wizard of Oz was on.  So then we just had to cobble together some costumes, which I must say is not the easiest thing in the world to do while living here with nowhere to go for supplies for homemade costumes.  But necessity is the mother of invention, and one thing we've learned about being a missionary is that our creative muscles are regularly exercised!

The easiest costume was for Asa, our munchkin extraordinaire!  Doesn't this little man make the perfect munchkin???

Caleb's lion costumes wasn't too bad either, since we had leftover animal masks from his birthday party earlier this year and I found some felt in the schoolroom to use.

Kai's was simple enough in that he just needed black clothes to be a spider.  But figuring out how to give him extra spider legs was a bit more difficult.  I found some black felt in the schoolroom and Eli concocted this.  Not too bad!

So here's our crew!

And here we all are.  Eli pulled together a last-minute scarecrow costume, and I figured out how to be Dorothy ("because you're the only girl in our family, Mom, and you have to be Dorothy!" said Caleb).  We didn't have a tin man, so I wrapped a puppet in tin foil and gave him a hat in the form of Kai's funnel toy from the sandbox, and Caleb loved the idea of using Curious George as a flying monkey, who actually had wings on his back but you can't tell in this picture.  It's the best we could do, but not too bad :)

We had a great night at Harvest Festival, which culminated in trick-or-treating around the compound and our kids getting good American candy that some visitors brought over.  It's amazing how exciting a box of Nerds or Reese's peanut butter cups can be :)  We thank God for times like this, when our missionary community pulls together to have a good time and celebrate our own culture when we tend to miss home the most: holiday time.