Despite being several thousand miles from any Native (North) Americans and/or Pilgrims, turkeys costing upwards of $70 each notwithstanding, we managed to celebrate Thanksgiving Day.
I spend many weekends with a family I’ve been referring to as my hosts or my Paraguay parents. Both of these titles feel a bit odd; they’re not really my hosts except when I visit, and they’re both too young to be my parents. Now that you are partially acquainted with them, I shall henceforth refer to them as the Caballeros, or Karen and Oscar. As is customary when introducing someone, I will tell you a bit about each of them. Karen is an American who went to Argentina on a scholarship to the ACC Bible college. She met and eventually married Oscar and has been living in Paraguay for 20 or so years. Oscar (owe-scar) is a Paraguayan from a town called San Pedro. He’s the general director of the school at which I work and one of the three pastors of the Lambaré church. Both are fabulous people. And now we continue.
Karen being American, she has had Thanksgiving at least a few times, and this year was no exception, though ever so slightly different. The most glaring deficit was the mashed potatoes, but I made up for that last night. Karen cooked a delicious couple of chickens, capelletti pasta, green beans, stuffing (amaaaaazing bread), corn, and gravy. We invited some Paraguayans and explained to them the reason for Thanksgiving and a bit about what happened. Much like the first Thanksgiving, we had some native food as well as our European fare. Only this native food was Paraguayan mandioca (I think it’s manioc in the states) and chipa (cheesy bread balls). So true to American tradition, the immigrants shared a delightful meal with the natives, and each brought their own gift to the table.
For dessert I made two sweet potato pies, though you wouldn’t know it by looking at them. Their sweet potatoes are either red or white and are much more firm than our orange ones. They don’t have pie crust, so I made one from scratch that didn’t turn out badly. The pies themselves turned out fine, I suppose. They tasted more or less like sweet potato, but a little more solidly built. Whipped cream would have been awesome; I’ll take note for next time. What I failed to take into account, however, was that Paraguayans don’t eat much sweets. Between 10 of us, including some hungry men, we barely ate half a pie. It took nearly 5 days to finish both off.
As of right now, I may be spending one more Thanksgiving with my beloved Paraguayans. I want to be here for the end of the school year, which happens this week. Maybe my family will plan to have a Thanksgiving dinner in December next year.
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I'm Jason, and I like to write.
Thank you for specifying the pronunciation of Owe-Scar’s name. I think it sounds so terrible when people call him Awe-Sker.