WORLD CULTURES

Our family is a blend of 2 vastly different cultures. Ethiopia and America. We're proud to be both. We like to learn about different cultures around the world. Our favorite part is to try new foods! I'm being totally serious. We just don't put up with "picky or fussy" eaters in our children. Too hard with so many people to please.

In home schooling this year we have been having so much fun learning about the world. We have been praying for countries and people groups that some adults cannot even pronounce. And some that honestly, before this year of study, I had never even heard of. We can sing our way around the world thanks to some "cheesy" (but hey - they actually work) geography songs. All the kids can label the countries in Africa. It has really opened our eyes to a much BIGGER world. Pretty cool stuff I think.

This last week we were studying Russia and all those "stan" countries....Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan to name a few. If you need help with pronunciation just ask my 5 year old :) Remember I told you our favorite part was trying new ethnic foods. I'm not talking about Taco Bell here. So we were so excited to find a little Russian cafe last week and took our whole family there for lunch.

But you can kind of imagine the scene. Large family with many young children, some black, some white, entering the little Russian cafe and asking for a bowl of borscht. One woman eating inside even felt compelled to come over to our table and ask us, "What are the kids going to eat? You know their potatoes are different than french fries here?" she asks us. And we reply, "Great! We didn't come here for chicken nuggets or french fries." We came for cabbage rolls, beef stroganoff, Siberian pelmeni (dumpling with meat), potato vareniki , crepes with strawberry syrup and of course some borscht. And that is exactly what we ate. The kids gobbled it up much to the woman's surprise and to the delight of our server!

I suppose we keep people guessing about us, but we have gotten used to it.