Halloween Home Evening

For Halloween we held a family home evening for our office staff and their families. These men are employed by the church in the mission office. It's a very unique situation that exists because there aren't enough senior couples to staff mission offices and because there are legal formalities and transportation, communication and living condition issues etc. that a non-Congolese person simply couldn't do. Young missionaries aren't used either because of insufficient computer and office skills. We would be lost without these three good men.

Theirry, Pascal and Aimé

Thierry is the office manager. He's a magician who's able to navigate the complexities of business in the Congo, secure transportation, facilitate communication, etc., etc. He also works with me on the medical needs of the missionaries. Pascal is in charge of apartments. He can negotiate a rent deal down to the bare bones, fix and find anything you can get in the Congo. They all deliver support money, supplies and missionaries. Aimé is Brent's driver and our all-around helper. His help in getting Brent to places for meetings is invaluable. Although Brent does a lot of driving, sometimes it's impossible for him to find and get to all the five stake centers, 25 other buildings, 17 apartments and many other places that he's required to go in this city of 10 million people. Driving to a place wouldn't be a huge task in the US. Here, there are no addresses, no GPS, no street names posted, and buildings and houses are in hard to places that you wouldn't even know were streets. Plus, the streets are one big traffic jam and blue and yellow taxis are crammed with people who get out without notice and driven by crazy drivers. Driving is exhausting. Amié's also a good shopper. He gets eggs, pop and produce for half what I can. It's the non-African-thing that's the disadvantage.

We decided to have a Halloween party. The biggest attraction of the evening was little Ariel. He's three months old, but spent his first two months in the hospital. Born at 7 months, it was pretty scary in the beginning. But he's looking strong now. We were all very happy to meet him & vied a bit for the chance to hold him.

They had NO idea what Halloween was about. We opted to downplay the scary parts. No witches, ghosts, skeletons, spiders, or bats. The kids are young and there's still a lot of fear and mysticism here in Africa, which we didn't want to encourage. So what was left? We did a power point to show Halloween costumes, pumpkins, trick or treat and Halloween parties and goodies. To decorate the apartment we made due with our Halloween quilt, an orange table cloth, an orange gift bag filled with green and some pipe cleaner flowers and a few assorted orange things.

Before the fun started we had dinner with sloppy joes, pasta salad, fruit, olives and pickles. Only the fruit wasn't foreign food to them, but they seemed to enjoy it and ate it all, except pickles.

We had big bowls of caramel corn for dessert.

We tried to replicate the things we do on Halloween. First came the traditional carving of the pumpkin. This was as close as we could get to a pumpkin and made for lots of fun.

Then it was on to "Color your Trick or Treat bag" and a game of "Don't Eat Jack"

The kids liked both activities. It doesn't take much to please the Congolese. Playing isn't a common thing here. Thierry's boy said, "Dad why do we always just preach a lesson in Home Evening? Let's play games next time."

To get costumes together was a bit of a challenge. I decided just to do hats to make them feel dressed up. There were kings, princesses, Native Americans and graduates from which to choose. All the girls chose princess hats and Jason chose the Indian one. Poor Johan (2) didn't like wearing the graduate hat, so he just carried it around and wouldn't be in the picture either.

The final activity of the evening was Trick or Treating. We had the senior couples go in all the rooms. Then the kids and Dads knocked on the doors and shouted Trick or Treat. A good time was had by all.

But...

Look at the Dads' faces as they went Trick or Treating with their kids for the first time . I'm not sure who liked it best.

The next morning the dads reported that Devina slept with her bag of candy that night. Alicia woke up asking for hers and Thierry snuck in and stole some of his children's cookies. Now there's a great American tradition! Haa! Haa! They all want to go live in the US and knock on doors. It was a very HAPPY HALLOWEEN with children, even if they aren't our grand kids.