Thanksgiving!!!

This Thanksgiving I have so much to be thankful for.  Being in Ghana for the past 3 and a half months has been great.  It has been quite interesting and a very good learning experience.  I have had to adjust to life here, and I have had to learn to be more patient, thanks to the obnoxious, relentless children I get to deal with everyday.  But the kids I get to teach everyday are all awesome kids, and I love all of them.  God has blessed me with the opportunity to learn so much while teaching incredible kids and I am so grateful for this.  This past Thursday, I took a break from my incessant, useless thoughts to really think about the friends and family I have back home.  I am so blessed to have so many people in my life who really care about me, and when I got to thinking about it, I mean really thinking, I couldn't even wrap my head around just how richly God has blessed my life with people who care for me.  If you are reading this, I thank you for caring and thinking of me, even as I am thousands of miles away.  I pray that everyone has had a great Thanksgiving.  God has given me so much to be thankful for and I am really working on trying to feel grateful everyday.  It is so easy to forget how much we have to be thankful.  When we look around at others, we can easily see that some are "better off" than ourselves, and if we are not careful, we will become filled with delusion, thinking our lives aren't good at all, and we have nothing to be grateful for.  But this is a very dangerous thing to believe, because denying God the thanks He is due is ignorance on our part.  Meister Eckhart once said, "If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough."  So give thanks, and be joyful because of what the LORD has done!

Here in Ghana, Thanksgiving is not a holiday so I was forced to go to school last Thursday!  What an outrage!  But I somehow survived, and made it through the week to Saturday.  Jennifa and I were invited to celebrate Thanksgiving with a missionary family from the U.S.  I wasn't sure what to expect as far as food, but I wasn't hopeful enough to expect all the traditional dishes served on Thanksgiving.  However, after being here for 8 years, the Nichols(the family who invited us over) really have mastered the celebration of holidays, and for our Thanksgiving lunch we had all the food one would normally eat!  It was unbelievable.  They had mashed patatoes, ham, turkey, sweet patato pie, casserole, rolls, cranberry sauce.  I was blown away by the selection of food and I was even more blown away by how amazing it all tasted!  I did not expect this at all.  It was such a blessing to be able to enjoy a full Thanksgiving meal and spending time with this family was a ton of fun.  I think we got to eat some of the best food I've had since being here.  And although we didn't know the Nichols well at all, they we so friendly to us and treated us like we were their best friends.  Saturday was a great day to relax and recharge.  We ate around 1 and just hung out the whole afternoon, talking with the Nichols and some other friends they had invited over.  For desert we had the choice of pumpkin pie, cherry cheesecake, and butterscotch pie!  I chose all three.  The Nichols have an 11 year old son who they adopted here in Ghana.  I was the closest one to his age, so I joined him in some seriouswii fun video games.  We were hanging out there all afternoon and into the evening, and it finally got so late that the Nichols insisted we stay the night.  So we ended up sleeping there, and I got to watch a movie, for the first time in quite awhile!  And we ended up getting lucky, because the Nichols weren't serial killers and we weren't murdered in our sleep.  But we got even more lucky when we got ham, eggs, and pancakes for breakfast!!!  And then leftovers for lunch!

To top the already great weekend off, we had a circus here at our school on Sunday evening.  Now I say circus, but as to not give the wrong idea I will clarify.  It was just one guy(French) who did different acrobatic feats and other circus-like displays of talent.  He had a whole act to go along with the show, pretending that there were supposed to be other performers who didn't show up so he had to fill in for them.  Unfortunately, he didn't speak English so someone had to translate, but I was still very entertained by the show.  In fact, I was even part of the show!!  At one point in the show, the guy said he usually has a piano player, but the man wasn't there so he asked the audience if anyone knew how to play the piano.  Well no one was volunteering(and I wasn't about to volunteer, mind you) but then out of the uneasy stillness, I hear Jennifa yell my name.  Sitting nearby was the director of the school, who caught my eye and signaled for me to go up there.  I was trying to tell him I can't really play and the circus guy saw and he too signaled for me to come up and play.  So I was forced, more or less, to go up on stage and play piano(video coming to facebook soon!). I wasn't really excited or upset about having to go play, but it ended up being kinda fun.  I threwdown a little Fur Elis, followed by some 5 for Fighting, and then went into a little bit of jamming.  I played for 5 to 10 minutes, without any practice or preparation, and I'm not trying to brag, but I was pretty dang amazing.  But the show went on another 30 minutes, with some impressive juggling, and hanging from ropes and tightrope walking.  In my opinion, it was a very entertaining show and I really enjoyed it.  This was a great end to an awesome weekend.

Next week we are having final exams, so there is a lot of grades to be entered on the computer which will make this a busy week.  We have some other projects we gotta finish up as well.  But after exams next week, we have one more week and then we have a 2 and a half week break!  So that is what's been going on over here.  Pretty exciting stuff eh?  I hope everyone reading this is doing well and I appreciate your love and care.
Much Love and Blessings to all!

Peace(is where it's at)
Jordan/Kwaku