New Years Eve!

We celebrated New Years last night with a party and fireworks!  I spent the whole of the day doing hospitality things, mainly organizing the visitors and helping set up all the activities for the festa (party).  It was a really long day, of course, but I loved it.  I was incredibly busy from 9am until 1230am but it was still great :o) The festa started at 7pm with a movie: Merry Madagascar (which, btw, is completely hilarious. a must own for every parent) and then we began the stations.  I had set up 8 different stations with crafts or games: making a prayer card, a crown, necklaces out of beads, etc and my favorite: chubby bunny.  This game is awesome, Ithe counselors used to do it at the YMCA camp.  You put a marshmallow in your mouth and say “Chubby bunny” and then slowly add one and repeat without ever eating the marshmallow.  It was completely hilarious, I think the boys about 12-15 were the best at it because they understood the competition in the game and they had no inhibitions about having chunks fly out of their mouths.  It’s a completely disgusting game but so hilarious!  Sadly, I left my camera at my family’s house so I didn’t get any good pictures or videos. The stations were run by visitors and missionaries and they were going really well, until we tried to switch stations.  My American head just assumed we’d have a loud speaker or something and someone would say “Switch!” and bam, it’d be done.  But no, of course not, what was I thinking?  I looked around for the loud speaker and it hit me: I live in Mozambique.  So the switching was hectic, to say the least :o) We only switched stations 3 times (instead of 8 haha!) but it still took almost 2 hours.  So in the end, it worked out just fine and the kids were happy :o)  Then we watched another movie, gave them a second (and fancy) dinner with soda and sausage sandwiches, and finally headed down to the soccer pitch for fireworks!  This was my favorite part of the whole evening.  Here in Africa they’re allowed to set off fireworks on their own wherever they’d like, but they’ve only got 30 minutes.  Very scary for any American-raised girl…this whole “anyone can set them off” business.  I’ve never been so close to fireworks in my life.  The hilarious part was that the fireworks scared some of the children, there’s a beautiful display in the sky and their crying from the sounds…typical, but still a little funny. When the fireworks were all going off around the community it was stunning.  It was so beautiful.  All across the horizon all you could see were sparkles and fireworks.  The trees and houses covered up some of them, and that’s when all you’d see were sparkles.. but they looked like fairies to me :-) At one point someone right next door to us set off a truly professional firework that kept bursting and bursting for like 2 minutes.  It was so cool.  Last night was my favorite day here, by far :o)