Culture Night

I got the idea recently for a fun tradition that I decided to start in our family. We call it "Culture Night". One night a month we focus on a specific country--we either prepare a meal from that country or go out to a restaurant (one benefit of our area: there are tons of ethnic restaurants from all over!). In order to attend the meal you have to have completed your research. We each decide on a certain aspect of that country that we'll learn about and then teach to the rest of the family.

We had our very first Atkin Family Culture Night last Saturday. I chose Tanzania to start with since I thought it would be pretty easy. We've been there before, plus I had already checked out an East African recipe book from the library. (I stumbled upon that entire series of recipe books in the kids section of the library recently and I thought it was so cool. I can't wait to try more of them.)

Here's the table:

Here's the food:

(beef and plantain stew, rice, chips miyai, chapatis, and mangoes)

You'll notice the lack of silverware. We ate with our hands! That was definitely the kids' favorite part. In fact just today Elizabeth had some leftovers and insisted on eating them with her hands, too. We have this system where the kids get a warning if they are not using good manners and if they get 3 they have to do some sort of cleaning job later. Anyway, during this meal the girls kept joking that if we used a fork we would get a warning! :) Nate was having great fun playing with his rice (which--come to think of it--isn't too different from any other night).

I thought the kids wouldn't even touch the stew but they loved it! They really loved the chips miyai, too.

After dinner, we got dressed up:

Joe let Elizabeth wear his shirt since the girls both wanted something to wear.

Then we did our little presentations. Natalie was assigned language so she learned some Swahili to teach us:

1-10, plus she learned some other words:

I think Elizabeth outdid us all. She wanted to learn about the history of Tanzania. We got a book from the library and she literally wrote a 5 page report all by herself. Granted, it was entirely plagiarized, but still--I was completely blown away by her enthusiasm for this. If only she could work up that kind of enthusiasm for her school assignments!
I'm not sure how much of it she understood but she read it all to us and I think some of it sunk in.

I talked about Tanzanian holidays and traditions and Joe was assigned wildlife. We watched some of his safari videos. It was a really fun night!

I think this tradition will have a lot of benefits:
1) We haven't been able to eat dinner as a family very much lately (except on Sundays) because of Joe's hours. This make me sad because I have dreams of beautiful family dinners where we grow closer together while we eat delicious, nutritious food (I can dream, right? :). This tradition helps me live that dream a little bit.
2) We love to travel and we love to learn about different parts of the world. While we can't really travel right now, we can at least experience new things now. Then, if we do travel in the future, maybe the kids will at least be more adventurous and willing to try new things when the time comes (or on their missions, or whenever).
3) It makes learning fun.
4) It's a scheduled time in the month where we will definitely be together as a family. We need to be better about scheduling more things ahead of time so that other stuff doesn't get in the way.

Natalie got to choose our next country and she chose Greenland. I think this will be a bit more challenging....