Dinner Party

Our volunteer teammate is going back to America in a couple of weeks and so she wanted to prepare dinner for our tailor, Sam, and his family here in G-Vegas. The plan had been in the works for a few weeks, but it was finally decided that we would bring dinner to his family’s house this past Saturday evening. She wanted to make “American” food, so we took noodles, tomato sauce, and beef (not ground beef like you’d usually find with spaghetti, but beef tips). This involved 2 big almost-overflowing pots of sauce with meat and 1 big definitely-overflowing pot of noodles…transporting it was interesting, but I was driving so I was lucky enough not to have an insanely hot pot of tomato sauce sitting on my lap while driving down a road made entirely of sand and rocks.

Well, when you’re the only white people in town, apparently it’s a big deal when you’re coming over to dinner and bringing real, live, American food. When we arrived, Sam and his entire family (wife, mother, father, sisters, nieces…everybody) was, as always, extremely gracious and hospitable to us. Sam has a nice house and the room we were in had a tile floor and they had been burning incense. There were cushions set up against the walls on one side of the room, blankets on the floor in the middle, and plastic lawn chairs set up on the other side of the room…those were for us. They even have a TV so we sat in our lawn chairs and watched the World Cup!

The reason we realized this was a pretty big deal, though, is because Sam had invited a photographer friend over to document the evening. Seriously…we tried to offer him food…he wasn’t there to eat, only to take pictures. So throughout the evening, we would pose for pictures with the family…but especially with the food. They really wanted pictures of that food.

Also, one of the guys who works for Sam, Ian, came over and he is also our friend. A couple weeks ago, Sam had gone down to one of the little boutiques (convenience-type store) in the market and asked the clerk what the white girls always buy. The answer: Cokes. So Ian had picked up 4 Cokes on his way to dinner! Again I was lucky because I was sitting by Abby, who is allergic to caffeine. We didn’t want to turn down a gift so we worked a little system out where we both set our bottles on the floor between us and Abby pretended to drink out of one while I really drank out of both of them. I really took one for the team.

Then it was time to eat. It was a little confusing trying to figure out which platters to put everything on because there were several groups of us (remember…we sit on the floor and all eat with our hands out of the same bowl). There was a men’s circle and two women’s circles so we dished it up the best way we knew how. And we think they liked it, but they may have just been being nice.