Carnival Tuesday

We are now in Lent. The Sunday before we helped the children make Alleluia banners to "bury" (put in a box under the fireplace), since we do not use this word in the liturgy during Lent.

Ruth Anne was convinced that the letter "L" has the bar across the top. You know it isn't easy that this letter looks like the numeral "1" which she is starting to recognize consistently.

We also made stars for Mehri for International Women's Day on Tuesday, March 8. This isn't customary. It's just what Ruth Anne thought her nanny would like for a present.

Because of Women's Day, both Joe and I had Carnival Tuesday (Mardi Gras) off. Party!

We started the day with a pancake brunch at our house.

The big pot is channa and aloo (curried chickpea and potato). One of the highlights of our day was that there is a new intensive English teacher at the International School. She's Trini and would have been jumping up except that then she would have been out of Turkmenistan when her visa expired. She was glad to find a little bit of Carnival and we were thrilled to have her Naparima accent and Soca collection setting the tone of our party.

I had masks to color and macaroni "beads" to string out on the table. While coloring his mask the director of the school told me he was "excited to go to Karen's house because he knew there would be an activity table."


At one point during the party, Margarite, a little French girl we know from church, sat down in the middle of the floor absorbed in the threading job. We moved her to the children's table. This is the kind of work that warms my heart.

Later this beautiful girl started collecting the cards off the floor in the midst of this Carnival chaos.

After things quieted down, Neil found the pickles and bean that a friend thoughfully brought as a vegetarian hostess gift and started stacking them.

After the festivities at our house, we went to another house. Two of the teachers at the school lived in New Orleans and made jambalaya (or as close as you can get in Turkmenistan).

It was a gorgeous day, temps in the 80's, so we finished the afternoon with a bag-piping session. The kids and I ran around barefoot in the grass, then ate popcorn, then went to the basketball court, while Joe deep fried rellenos. They don't call it Fat Tuesday for nothing, you know.