Christmas in Meskine again

As was true in previous years while living here, our post office box has been free of the junk mail from the local merchants trying to get us to purchase their goods. I suppose that we could even say that our lives have been free from clutter as well. Christmas here is quite a simple affair both for us and for our national friends who are believers. Here are some highlights.

Many of our friends and employees rarely eat much beef because it is too expensive to place in their normal or daily diet. Additionally, their diet is a fairly simple one consisting mostly of millet dough dipped into a tasty sauce made from locally available plants. So when Christmas comes, they take the opportunity to have a small feast with their family and usually participate in it as a group. For example, our construction crew each gave a few dollars towards the purchase of beef. Collectively, they had enough money to buy a lot of it--two cows worth “on the hoof” to be exact! Danny witnessed “the bovine death march” down the little dirt road to the home of our construction foreman. There, they were slaughtered and divided equally among the men who had participated. FYI, all the parts of the animal were used, and we mean all! The local church that we attend also followed the same plan so that the members could have a feast on Christmas.

Gift-giving differs from the US in many ways. There isn’t a lot of emphasis on quantity of gifts or on their price. Many, including the children, receive one new outfit of clothes, and that’s it. The other difference is that they are all very content with the little (by some standards) that they receive.

As a team, we celebrated Christ’s birth Christmas Eve. Our menu was roasted lamb, leeks in cheese sauce, homemade rolls, and fruit salad, topped off by Dutch apple pie and pecan pie (that finished off our stash from Louisiana!) We read the Christmas story, sang Christmas carols, and thanked God for His incredible gift to us. Our team member from Holland has two friends visiting her, and the trio sang a beautiful, old Dutch hymn and then translated the words for us. We had a gift exchange ($4 limit on purchase price!) and everyone had a wonderful time.

Today we attended a church service with our national friends, and the pastor emphasized the real joy of Christmas and drew a contrast between the joy that comes from a personal relationship with Christ and that joy that accompanies food, feasts, commercial benefit, etc. He noted that many of the local merchants who aren’t even believers have a certain type of joy over the money that they will make because of this holiday. However, there is an abiding joy that comes from knowing Jesus that runs like a thread through good times and bad, through plenty and lean times. We were encouraged to live everyday in this joy made available to us through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.

Our team enjoyed being ambassadors of the hospital’s Christmas gifts to our leprosy patients and also to the inpatients at the hospital. We individually packaged 100 kilos of sugar, 20 kilos of tea, and 100 cubes of soap. On Tuesday, we added cooking oil and Vaseline to the bags and drove out to the homes of our leprosy patients who applauded warmly with their severely deformed hands and joyfully chatted with us during our visits. Today after church we went to the bedside of each inpatient to distribute gifts. Many of them are of a different faith, but all were very grateful.

It was hard to be so far away from our sons and our daughter-in-law and our extended families, but they are doing well in our absence, and we are so grateful to be back in Meskine.

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