Thanksgiving starts with a live turkey

We all know thanksgiving starts with a live turkey...I guess us city-folks just aren't the ones who usually kick off the process~
Well, this time we did. On Friday Seth and I went to Joe's house (on his newly purchased motorcycle) to meet our turkey. He was 20kgs (maybe...) and running around the yard. So never having prepared our own turkey we stalled a little by watching a beautiful Lake Victoria sunset. Then we returned to Joe's, and his family was ready to go. So two of Joe's Kenyan brothers grabbed the turkey and held him down by wings and feet, and Seth was given a giant knife. We approached the poor bird and Seth grabbed onto its head---And in about 5 seconds we had a headless turkey squirming around and with blood shooting out of its neck at a pulses rate. (I'm sorry if that was graphic. But personally, I am much more in touch with my food here, literally.)
Then the defeathering- I was reading the Prodigal Summer last week by Barbara Kingsolver, its a novel, and in the chapter I was reading on Friday the characters actually catch and roast a turkey, what are the odds! - so with my newly acquired knowledge on defeathering, I got to casually mention that we would need scalding water to loosen the feathers and other fun facts like that. Us mzungus were pretty useless in the process though, other than Seth's work, Joe's family jumped to it and defeathered the whole thing while we were still trying to figure out where to start.
Saturday was the big feast- Lo and I went to Amanda's in the morning and cooked literally all day (new found respect for all you Tday preparers out there! love you mom), the turkey was an exciting challenge as none of us had ever prepared one before. We made sweet potatoes, sweet corn, pies, stuffing, everything and finished cooking around 5- all on two burners and one oven mind you, which made it all the more exciting and like one of those awful word-math problems. The oven was not temperature controlled, and only one burner on the stove worked, so we also had a cylinder of gas with a burner in the middle of the kitchen- and we only knocked it over twice. We botched the gravy- but everything else came out great. The day was a lot of work, but so much fun.
We all gathered around the table and said what we were thankful for, then after serving our guests we dug in. We thought we would be short on food but there was more than enough to go around. No football, but we watched our rafting video instead :)
Last night we went to our favorite spot in town- Ivy G's- a small coffee house/sports bar and shared stories all night (we had friends come from Meru and Nairobi). However, not having eaten any of these food for a long time really put my stomach in a bind- I had rolling cramps all night, probably from eating real butter, sugar, and all those other rich american foods. I'm not looking forward to the harsh transition back to American food right in the middle of the holiday season- I'll really have to pace myself- really, cabbage and flour/water to start.

Last weekend we went to Mfangano island in Lake Victoria. My friend from high school, Annika, and her friend Kelsey are working out there for an NGO. The NGO is building a community center, with a computer lab, VCT, radio station, etc, and the only requirement to become a member is to know your HIV status, still confidential, and be retested every 6 months. (40% of the population is HIV+).
To get to the island we had to take a bus, literally packed two people a seat with 15 more standing in the aisles, a few chickens, and we even saw a sheep get tossed on the top with the rest of peoples luggage. Next was a very across a straight of water, to another part of the mainland. And then we took a smaller passenger boat for a two hour ride to Mfangano itself. Like always, we didn't exactly know where we were going- all we knew was Luanda-Otieno, Mbita, and Kitawi Beach, the three towns where we needed to change modes of transport. After traveling all day and multiple false beach stops we got to Kitawi and Annika met us. She showed us the community center and then we went for a swim in Lake Victoria while the sun set just over the tip of the island- beautiful.
We stayed with Joel, the man who is heading up the project and where Annika also stays. Joel is the oldest son in his family so he inherited the family land- with multiple houses. There was an empty house on the land so the 6 of us travelers stayed there. We talked with Joel all evening and cooked spagetti and sauce by moonlight. We slept in our open air house, a mud and stick structure with a tin hip roof and quite the termite population (the rafters and collar ties were about shot). We all had mosquito nets- and I tell you, they give you this strange feeling of invincibility- like hey I'm sleeping under this net, so that spider I just saw that could kill me or that python that shed its skin outside definitely can't get me- its funny, but my friends here feel the same way.
The next morning we got up early to begin our hike. We were only going to climb to a lookout, but upon reaching there we decided to go higher. We hiked and rock climbed all the way to the top, it took about 2 hours to climb up, and it was the most intense workout I've had here. It was well worth it. There are communities at the top of the island who climb up and down like its no big deal- but we were wiped. Joel decided we wouldnt be able to make it down the way we came up so we took a tour of the ridge and came down a few beach communities over. The hike lasted about 5 hours.
We got back to the homested and realized our boat was leaving shortly, so no time for a lake dip, we headed down to the beach. As we were waiting we saw a boat fly by and realize it was the one we needed! We attempted to flag it down, but were not successful. So we had to sprint up to the road, Joel called us motorbikes and we had to race the boat to the last beach stop on the island. I have never gone so fast or gotten so much air on a piki-piki! But luckily we made it, and began our trip home.

I will have photos from all of this to share when I get back. For the time being I'm not using my flash drive anywhere because at school last week I got a virus that wiped all my photos and papers off their only storage space!
I have a friend who knows a guy who was able to recover everything, thank goodness, after an hour of tampering with it. And as it turned out, the virus was named Raila Odinga (the prime minister) and who's name and election results was the cause of terror and many lives lost in the country. And now it's making the rounds on word documents and photos- horrible, haha.

This is my last week in Kisumu :(
I'm excited to see everyone at home, but not quite ready to leave Kenya. I will go to Nairobi on saturday, take finals on sun-tues and then a few of us are going to climb mt. kenya. And I get home two weeks from today.
I don't know where ANY of my winter stuff is so hopefully it will be a mild december day. :)

Can't wait to see everyone and show you photos and share stories!