Tired out and an Angel by Louisa

Tired out from biking!

We had a fun time at Kisolanza last week! Amisadai and I took our bikes and had a great time riding all around! We had fun with Andy and Angela. I got so tired! And dinner was so late it was past my bedtime! I even fell asleep before the pudding came!

Tired out from eating. I missed the chocolate pudding :(

This week we had our Christmas Service with the international church. I was the angel, Gabriel and Amisadai was a narrating sheep. Amisadai played the violin for the carols with a flute, clarinet, cello and piano.



We found a chameleon on a rock



What a smile!



Hanukkah in Tanzania

Hanukkah

By Amisadai

Hanukkah is a Festival of Light. Jewish people celebrate Hanukkah. It is in early December and lasts 8 days.

The Jews are celebrating the miracle of the oil in the temple in 165 BC. After winning the battle against the Syrians and Greeks, the Jews took back the temple and wanted to rededicate it to God. But there was only enough oil to last one day. It was a miracle that God made it last for eight days.  So today, Jews, to remember those 8 days light a Menorah. They light 9 candles.

People today play a game called “Dreidl.” This is a game that is played with a spinning top which has nine sides and four sides have a Hebrew word on. SHIN means “put one in,” HEY means “take half,” GIMEL  means “take everything,” and NUN means “do nothing.”  Each player starts with ten “gelt” (money or sweets) and the winner is the one who wins all the gelt.

At Hanukkah people eat fried food like doughnuts, Hamantashen (which are small biscuits with jam in the middle) and fried potato cakes called latkes. They eat fried foods because they are remembering the miracle of the oil.

 We celebrated Hanukkah this year. It was fun!

Food (L to R) Latkes, jam donuts, hamentashen biscuits.
Louisa made the menorah. We are holding our dreidls.

Making Mud Houses and A Shadow Play

When we were in Magozi last week, we were working on our neighbours house. Everyone is getting their houses ready for the rains, putting more straw and mud on the roof, or batty (which is a tin roof). We were helping on the walls. It is really fun and very dirty throwing the mud on the side of the house.

When we got back to Iringa, we had Thanksgiving! After dinner, we did our Shadow Puppet show "The Story of Kuang-li" for Andy and Angela and Marc. Watch it here!



And Advent has started! Every day we do our big advent calendar and read from our special advent book. We drew 25 lines on a candle which we light every night. We are making an advent candle wreath. We have made some light window decorations as well. And the best thing about Dec 1st was a big surprise of lots of Christmas parcels at the post office! We couldn't even carry them all!

All the bunnies are well.