International Potluck

I know I might sound like a church lady saying this, but I'm starting to hate potlucks. It seems that for every occasion here we have a potluck. Even our Christmas dinner is a potluck. Grrrr. It's taking the fun out of cooking.

However, I must admit this weekend was quite a nice occasion--the annual International Potluck at our school. The premise is we have quite the international crew at our school, and we should celebrate it. I think there's around 40 different countries represented at KAS.

For the potluck part of the evening, everyone must bring a dish from their home country to share. It's a far cry from the mall's "international" food court. You really could just meander around the continents sampling your favorite foods or trying some new delights like South African brutwurst or spicy Korean Kim Chi. Yum! The Chinese Petroleum families actually live at a hotel and eat out of a restaurant daily. This night they brought the whole restaurant staff with them.
As for the performance part of the program, students dressed in their home country's traditional clothing and showed it off in the Parade of Nations, which Rachel was in charge of. I had the honor of being the MC for the night. (You know how much I hate being on stage and such.)

As cheesy as it may be, the potluck "Where Learning is Cool" helped to raise funds to air condition the school as well as lead to a greener Khartoum. Yup...you read that correctly! We don't have air conditioning here, just swamp coolers. I personally welcome the respite from the 110 heat that just doesn't seem to let up!

In addition, our school has planted 20,000 trees around the city and has 1,500 growing awaiting transplantation, with hopes of offsetting some of the impact we may have on the environment with new ACs.

It was a great night and luckily, I won a prize in the raffle! A gift certificate for dinner to my favorite restaurant in town. Phew...at least it's not another potluck!