Bridge to the garden
Fall has been a really busy time here. Since I last updated, we had a harvest festival complete with hundreds of pounds of sweet potatoes, a 90th birthday party, impromptu dance parties in the kitchen, a protest at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, a huge Thanksgiving celebration, new refugee families, many visitors and lots and lots of English classes.
Coffee, celebrating her 90th birthday
Eating groundnut stew at the harvest festival!
Making sweet potato biscuits... you can put sweet potatoes into literally everything.
Sometimes it feels like all the leaves fell off the trees at once and summer suddenly disappeared, but when I think back to all the things we’ve done, I know that can’t be true.
Carlton visits. I'm hilarious and this picture proves it.
Carlton came to visit for Thanksgiving this past week, and it was nice to see this place through the eyes of someone new. Even though I’m still very new on the spectrum of people who live here, it is easy to take things for granted, and so it was nice to see him getting excited about things.
The Karen Choir singing at the Thanksgiving service.
It was also good to show him all the things I’ve been talking about for three months, and I think that he wasn’t disappointed. Plus, along with the traditional Thanksgiving celebration which brings many former volunteers and refugees back to Jubilee, this year marks the 30th anniversary of the community’s founding, so there were even more people here than usual. I think the total ended up being about 260 guests, and we couldn’t have asked for a more perfect November day for everyone to come celebrate and give thanks.
The line for Thanksgiving lunch going into the k-house.
With less than one month to go at Jubilee, the reality of leaving is starting to sink in, and even writing this has made me nostalgic for things that just happened. Today I started panicking thinking about grad school applications, finding a job and moving. Normally, I’m kind of prone to that sort of thing, but it is much less common since I’ve been here so it is more notable I guess.
There are so many parts of this life here that I want to take with me, it would be easier just to stay, but I know that’s not an option for me right now.
Hands, hands, hands, thank you God for hands...
For more information…
The Jubilee Partners October newsletter
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