Thanksgivings Past

Last week we spent Thanksgiving at the beach in Ventura and it was fantastic. As we were sitting down for dinner looking out over the ocean, I thought of Khartoum, Sudan, where I spent the first Thanksgiving of our marriage. I was working for USAID and left two weeks after our Honeymoon for six weeks in Sudan, where we were working on the Darfur crisis.

While in Sudan, we all lived in a house a few miles from the U.S. Embassy, which I called "Real World Khartoum." One man, Jim, had been there for months, and cooking was his outlet. He decided to prepare a big Thanksgiving dinner for all of us, and and he even ordered a Turkey for $300 that was flown in all the way from Amsterdam on the biweekly KLM flight.

Although the Turkey made the flight, it never made it beyond the airport in Khartoum, where overzealous Sudanese customs agents suspected our prize cargo of carrying bird flu and incinerated our turkey (along with Jim's last hope at sanity). Somehow a frozen Turkey from Amsterdam was a bigger threat and a higher priority for them than genocide in Darfur...

Since the embassy was closed on Thanksgiving, we took a rare day off (we were working seven days a week) and organized a trip to some pyramids along the Nile at a place called Meroe up near the Egyptian border. So I spent Thanksgiving morning on camelback riding through the Sudanese desert.

And when we got home, Jim had managed to find some chicken in a little market in Khartoum and we had a fine Thanksgiving after all. I don't think I would recommend Thanksgiving (or Spring Break, for that matter) in Khartoum, but it made for a memorable holiday.