Thanksgiving in Uruguay

Jerry and I have much to be grateful for. We have each other for one thing. I have often thought about how hard it would be to be here without him. I feel for the young missionaries. Because we are together, life seems much more normal. We have 37 years of common memories and life experiences to keep us from getting too homesick.

The church here is also very similar. The talks are about gospel subjects and the lessons are well prepared. I am always impressed with the members here. Our ward has about 60 people who attend every week, but the bishop has a goal of 90. Actually, we have that many active members, but their attendance isn´t consistent. It´s the same everywhere.

We have been having missionaries to dinner, and for Thanksgiving, we had the Hermanas from our ward to dinner at 8:15. After I invited them, I realized I had never made any of the food we eat at Thanksgiving here in Uruguay. We didn´t have a potato peeler, potato masher, wire whip, or a pie plate. Turkeys here are very small (9 lbs. or so) and the one I saw in the freezer case was $50 US! We decided that chicken was going to work just fine. But I hadn´t roasted a chicken either. They don´t have Stovetop stuffing mix, canned pumpkin or canned yams. SO, I started figuring out how to make Thanksgiving dinner here.

I checked at several supermarkets and sundry stores looking for the utensils and pans I would need. There are no stores like Walmart where you can get everything you need in one place, which isn´t all bad. I kind of like that, but it does make it more complicated when trying to find different things. I found everything I needed between three stores.

I checked the internet for the recipes I needed. At the supermarket, I found fresh potatoes, sweet potatoes, short skinny celery with lots of leaves, sage, flour, sugar, but not shortening or lard, brown sugar, cloves, ground ginger, or poultry seasoning. I didn´t want to try cooking one of the fresh pumpkins I saw there. It was half green and I wasn´t sure if it was orange inside or not, so I decided to make a carrot pie instead, like my mom does. Thank you, Mom, and also for teaching me how to make stuffing from scratch.

The night before (after work, and going shopping for the ingredients)I cooked and blended the carrots (there is a blender in our apartment), baked the sweet potatoes and cut them up, and toasted and diced the bread for the stuffing. On Thanksgiving Day, we went to work as usual. We could have taken the whole day, but we were short volunteers, and it would have left the office short-handed. I left work an hour early, and went to the local store and got a fresh chicken (5 lb. or more), whipping cream, pie plate, etc. I rode the bus home and started on dinner.

I put the chicken in the oven with the carrot pie (I used butter instead of shortening for the crust.) Next I put the potatoes on to boil, and started to sautee the celery, onions, and garlic in butter for the stuffing. I made the glaze for the sweet potatoes out of white sugar and butter, hoping it would carmelize. I poured it over the sweet potatoes and baked them in a hot oven (200 C.) after the chicken was done. The sauce caramelized in the oven and the yellow yams turned more orange. Yes!


The chicken turned out just like a small turkey. It was beautiful! The potatoes and gravy were delicious! Jerry said the stuffing was the best he´d ever had. The pie turned out and I served it with whipped cream that was whipped with a wire whisk in a coffee mug.



Jerry is holding the fork with his left hand while he carves with his right. The Hermanas are happy to celebrate their productive day with American food!


Hermana Casebolt and Hermana Gardner were so exited when they came. They had found 6 new investigators that day! They had looked up former contacts to give them one last chance. One the way to the last contact, they had talked to a woman sweeping the sidewalk in front of her store. The lady was very receptive about the Joseph Smith story, the Priesthood being restored, and everything! What a wonderful thing to eat dinner together and hear about the amazing work they were doing! We have been truly blessed!

As for me, I felt very blessed to be able to serve a dinner to guests where EVERYTHING I had made was an experiment. That was a little scary, but it worked out. I think someone was praying extra hard for the Hermanas to have a good Thanksgiving and I was an instrument in the Lord´s hands to make it happen. Your prayers in our behalf were felt because I truly felt guided. (Don´t laugh--it was hard.)

My Spanish is getting better. Today was a good day. I explained in fairly good Spanish (with conjugated verbs) to one of the darling young women volunteers, how to make a list of the people who have resumes here. I showed her how to cut and paste with the keyboard, and how to evaluate the resumes to see if any important information was missing. She understood me and was excited to do something that the whole office was working on. I prayed for the gift of tongues this morning, and was happy when I realized that the Lord was answering my prayer. He is truly there for us and for everyone who asks. I know we are being especially blessed because of our calling, however, the Lord will bless you in your righteous efforts also. No task is too small for the Lord. He is there for us.

A couple of weeks ago, as I was making telephone calls to check on job placements, I came across an unusual name. Everyone here uses two last names, one of them being the mother´s maiden name, and one of the names for this young woman was Pacharoti. I had baptized two girls, teenagers, in the city of Rivera in 1970, and had always wondered whether they managed to stay active. When I asked this young woman whether they could possibly be relatives, she told me that they were her aunts. She also told me that they had married good LDS men, and had been sealed in the temple. They had raised righteous families, 8 children between the two, had sent out 5 missionaries, and that every one of the children had been married in the temple. I am reminded that we are not always aware of the results of our work in the church. The words of a hymn came to my mind. "My voice shall echo the message sweet, I´ll say what you want me to say.¨ Our voices do echo, down the long years, and who can predict what can happen if we say what he wants us to say.

Our work goes well, but as soon as we master one set of skills, it seems we have to begin learning another. We did complete the teaching of the 12 hour career workshop for the first time this week. We survived it, but we do need to improve, and I think that the, (mostly self-inflicted), pressure to improve at our jobs is one of the most difficult parts of the mission for us. It is also, perhaps, the most rewarding part of the mission.

We have had significant luck with encouraging inactive people and then having them show up at church. Whether the changes are permanent we can´t know, but it is surprising how important a little bit of attention can be. Often all we have offered is a phone call or a kind word.

The only unusual thing that happened this week, was that I had the chance, on Saturday evening, to run in a 10 kilometer race in Montevideo.

There were 7000 runners, cheering crowds, lovely weather, and a beautiful course.
It is almost impossible to describe just how many runners there were, but if you go to werunmontevideo.com they have some amazing pictures, which

This is my Bishop, (also my boss), and his son. I know it is a bad idea to beat your boss, but I beat them both, running it in 61 minutes, my best 10k ever.
After the race, Betty and I walked home on one of the prettiest spring nights of the year.
The two buildings with bright lights in back of us are, believe it or not, the towers of the World Trade Center of Montevideo