GUESTS, a DUCK, and a BIRTHDAY

February 18-21, 2011

It was a joy to have our South African short-term teammates, Terence and Michelle, out for a visit this weekend (they are living in Asuncion doing administrative work). We had our alarm set to meet them at 5AM Friday morning at the bus stop, but their bus arrived at 3AM instead. Needless-to-say, they were left to fend for themselves. Luckily, there were a few people out at that hour to point the way to our house (everyone in town knows where the North American doctor lives).

There’s always extra mouths to feed around here: Our 2 interns are on the left (thanks for praying for them, they are having a great time) and Terrence and Michelle are on the right.

Julia is sitting with us at the table now. Her head barely comes above it!





We packed a lot into the weekend – we were either going out visiting or people were over visiting us or we were just cooking and cleaning and being entertained by the kids. Terence and Michelle joked that they had a very luxurious weekend doing all kinds of things that they’d never be able to afford in South Africa.

For example, we went out visiting and the teens of the house decided to paint our finger nails.



One of the interns host sister came over and desperately wanted to fix Michelle’s hair.



So, after being thoroughly pampered – hair and nails - we decided to eat Ben & Jerry’s ice cream (I have a very yummy B&J recipe).



Next, we ate delicious duck. Paraguayans always laugh when I tell them that in North America (and apparently in South Africa too) duck is VERY expensive and we never ate it before moving here.

Picking a winner of a dinner duck


Killing the duck


Hanging it up to let the blood drip drip drip out


boiling the chicken to loosen the feathers


Plucking the feathers


And then you have a nude chicken


Singing/burning the stubble off


Scrapping any last hairs off. And then it is on to the gutting of the duck. didn't include these pictures.


The cooked duck. Sorry, we enjoyed dinner so much that I didn’t want to stop eating to take a picture of us around the table. Trust me, it was delicious!


We ended Sunday night by celebrating my birthday with yummy yummy s’mores (our intern brought marshmellows all the way from Canada for us). Our South African guest had s’mores for the first time!