Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving was great this year. I don't have any pictures to show for it but it was really a nice one. We ate at James' brother Kevin's house and I think one of the things that made it so nice was that we set up tables and fed all of the kids while Kevin told them the history of Thanksgiving and then we sang them a song. When they were all done we cleared everything away, sent the kids upstairs to play and all of the adults had a nice quiet Thanksgiving dinner. It worked out perfect. Then after dinner we played games and did a humanitarian project. Fun fun fun! For those of you that weren't there you really missed out. In addition, we had a sixteen year old student from Mali, West Africa staying with us for the week. Her name is Mariam and she goes to a boarding school down in Mount Pleasant, Utah. Mali is an extremely poor country and so she is very privileged to have the opportunity to come to school in the states. It was really fun to have her stay with us. She is a very sweet girl and was so helpful and easygoing. We took her to the play "Savior of the World" up in Salt Lake, she liked it but I think that she was more excited about getting a copy of her very own Book of Mormon in French which she had read a signifigant amount into the first night she got it. Mariam is Muslim but she was really eager to learn about Christ and about the LDS faith. She kept flipping through our children's storybooks and picking out the ones about Jesus to read. She is just learning English so the kids books were a good level for her. We showed her "Finding Faith in Christ" in French and after that she kept asking for more movies about Christ, preferably in French so that she could understand them better. She watched all of our movies of Christ and we talked quite a bit with her about our faith. We also let her know she could have missionaries come and teach her if she wanted. We hope that she continues to have interest. The whole idea of religion was quite foreign to her. She was Muslim by birth but did not know much about it, or any other faith. It was funny to realize how much our faith is incorporated in our everyday lives. It seemed like we were always praying, something she had not done. It was cool. Anyway, ta ta.