Decorations are up

It took all of a few minutes, but our decorations are up.


The stockings were hung by Bubu with care.


Our itty, bitty tree. I kinda love it more than a big one.

I always wish I had kids to decorate with because it just seems like it would be more fun. Well, my wish was granted this year because a neighborhood kid, Abduli, stopped by.


Abduli approves of the publicity.

To be more accurate, he goes to school where David teaches and they were on their way home and couldn't get the truck past this:


That water was going pretty fast. David and Abduli live just on the other side of that stream (in separate locations, in case that's not clear). And the woman in the picture in red lives on this side just across from our gate.

It's not snow, but we got a pretty good hailstorm for about 1/2 an hour while I was decorating the tree and listening to holiday music.


That's ice. Does that count?

So David and Abduli hung out for about 1/2 hour till the water went down. David was kind enough to help Chris with some computer issues and Abduli was kind enough to chase around the cat around and give me "feedback"* on the decorations.


He liked the hat best.


From Tanzania, we're all wishing everyone a blessed Advent and a happy holiday season. Hope all your holiday wishes come true.



*I put feedback in quotes because Abduli isn't quite verbal. Though we've seen a lot of improvement since he started school, he's still fairly limited. Although he didn't technically say anything much about the tree, he did enjoy saying "cat" and "him/her" a lot. To his credit, Tanzanians don't do a lot of  holiday decorations, plus Abduli's Muslim, so he probably doesn't have a lot of Christmas decorations in his house.** All of this contributed to him not really having any idea what was happening. But still, we had fun.

**Just because Abduli's Muslim doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't celebrate various holidays in non-religious ways. A Muslim woman I worked with last year said she put up a tree and celebrated  Christian holidays as well as Eids because people in the neighborhood were all mixed and she didn't want her family to feel like anyone was different. I like that sense of unity.