A Thanksgiving to Remember

How is it already the end of November? My friends and I talk about it all the time. I feel like I am in a constant state of summer time for multiple reasons. The first and most obvious, being that it is blazing hot here and rarely drops below 80, even at night time. I’m a girl from the north that’s used to four seasons, so this is odd to me. Another reason is that deep down I still feel like I should be in school. Like I’m still in highschool. And that this is just the summer time. This will sound so crazy, but the other Saturday I was sitting in a coffee shop writing a blog and as I finished it I was thinking to myself, what test do I have coming up that I need to study for?  I haven’t been in school for nearly 6 months. No tests here. Little side note with that, I have officially decided that I will be going to Calvin University next fall! So I guess this is just a 15 month summer before college. And the 3rd most fun reason it feels like summer is the amount of fruit we eat here. I probably eat half a pineapple a day, loads of watermelon, bananas at every meal, and my personal new favorite is rambutin (look similar to lychee) here’s a picture of them. But back home I only ate this much fruit during the summer when it was in season. 

What I was getting at through the whole long tangent was that thanksgiving really snuck up on me. But boy will I remember this one for years, and not just because we’re in Cambodia, but also because we all had lice. Happy Licegiving! One team had found out they had lice the day before thanksgiving, but we decided to wear plastic bags over our heads and go to the dinner anyways. So after a long day in the village, we made our mashed potatoes and gravy, put bags over our heads, and headed to dinner. It was so much fun to eat a makeshift Turkey dinner (with no Turkey, just our favorite chicken sandwiches) and hangout with friends. After dinner we all got checked and 3 people on my team had lice. The other 4 of us were clear. So we headed home paranoid but had nothing to do for it so we went to bed and figured it out the next day. Woke up Friday morning and was able to go to a coffee shop and FaceTime into my families thanksgiving dinner which was great. We then went home and started planning for the next week and by early afternoon we were starting on lice treatment. We were all checked again and all smothered our heads in olive oil to kill any potential lice. So we sat checking each other for hours, all while dripping a mix of sweat and oil from our saran wrapped heads. Very bonding experience. That night Marly and I sat in our living room and started to make 240 paper fish for our teaching this week. We are doing the Jesus feeds 5,000 story and decided that each kid would get a paper fish to take home. So Mar and I sat, watched 7 episodes of the Chosen and cut out the 240 fish. We finally went to bed around midnight. Next morning we woke up and washed our hair with lice shampoo. This was the order my shower went, 2 washes of lice shampoo, let each sit for 5 minutes. 3 washes of dish soap to break up the oil, also 5 minutes for each, and then my normal shampoo and conditioner. Lot of standing around listening to music but hey my hair was clean after. I also never actually had lice or any sign of them in my hair which I am grateful. So that’s been my past weekend. Not exactly how I planned it. 

Before leaving for the race the one thing I was most nervous for, homesickness wise, was holidays. I was sad that family and friends were all going to meeting up together after being apart and I was not going to be there. But honestly, it was not a problem at all. Sure it was a bit sad to know I wasn’t there, but it made me happy to see people back home hanging out together. It was one of the first big moments that I realized that these people are like family to me. So the thing I was most thankful for this thanksgiving was friends that feel like family. 

God has been showing up in so many ways this past week and there’s so much I want to share but I’ll need to process through it and will post more later. I just wanted to give you this small update on my first major holiday away. 

Also, platforms are switching around and I’m not exactly sure what’s going on but I will let you know. I’m sorry for any confusion it is causing. 

God bless you all, 

Lauren