Harvest Thanksgiving Celebration

As the director of ARI said this morning, HTC 2008 is not officially over until we finish the cleaning today. After that preparation for HTC 2009 will begin. HTC stands for Harvest Thanksgiving Celebration. It is a time for all of the community members at ARI (staff, participants, and volunteers) to come together with past ARI community members and other visitors that come from all over Japan and all over the world to celebrate this year's harvest. Over 1,000 people come each year. We prepare tons of food from countries all over the world, have crafts and games for kids, have worship services, give farm tours, sell clothes and other items from all over the world, and have stage performances of dance, song, and drama. It is one of the, if not the major focus of the year. It lasts only two days, but we prepare for it the other 363 days of the year.

We've been hardcore preparing for this year's HTC since my arrival at ARI with weekly meetings and other activities. I was assigned to the Oishi Committee, which was in charge of the food. The community members submitted recipes to us and then we chose about 15-20 dishes to prepare each day, set prices for the dishes, purchased the ingredients, and finally cooked the food. It was absolutely insane!! There are only six burners in the kitchen and all of them were occupied for most of the day and night prior to each day of HTC with tons of chefs in the kitchen chopping, peeling, and cooking. You could barely move! We were in the kitchen until at least midnight both nights and in the kitchen again by 4:30 AM the next day!

Everyone prepared special dishes from his or her own country. I represented the U.S. with pumpkin bread and onion rings on Saturday and rhubarb pie on Sunday. I'm proud to say that we sold out very early on both days! The rhubarb pie was a special success because most people in Japan don't even know what rhubarb is so we had small samples for everyone to try.


A group of supporters from the U.S. (American Friends of ARI- AFARI) were here for HTC and they all came to help me roll out the pie crusts the night before. Making pies for 80+ is quite an undertaking!









The actual event of HTC flew by! I helped sell food, sampled food :), performed several dances, including dances that I made up for groups of us to dance to "Footloose" and "New York, New York," and a dance that a participant from Kirbati taught me and three of my friends. It was so fun!!! There was such an incredible feeling of celebration and community!

Last week we harvested our rice and we ate it for the first time at HTC so it was truly a harvest celebration! Harvesting rice was so fun! The whole community went out to the paddy fields with sickles and started chopping down the rice and laying it in bundles for others to tie and hang upside down from big bamboo drying racks. It was my first time to harvest rice and I must admit that I'm not the fastest rice harvester around. Some people, especially from the Philippines, flew through the field and were done with their entire row before I even got through 1/3 of mine. I did get a bit distracted with all of the cute frogs though! There were tons of little frogs everywhere!! I caught at least five to play with, but I let them go. We also caught tons of grasshoppers, which a participant from India fried and served to us for dinner. They were surprising delicious! I have definitely expanded my taste here. I've tried cow tongue, cow heart, and other organs, fish intestines, and now grasshoppers. There could be other things that I don't know about, but so far I have no complaints!
At the end of the day as we prepared to walk back, Myar-san who is from Myanmar, showed us how to make whistles from the leftover rice stalks. They were so cool! They sounded kind of like kazoos. A lot of us made them and had a good time blowing them during the 15 minute walk back to ARI! You could put up to three in your mouth at a time!

Being here at ARI has made me much more aware of the foods I eat, where they come from, and the people that grow them. The time in the morning and evening when we tend to our fields and livestock is called "foodlife work." Over the past few months, I've come to really learn the meaning of foodlife and how important it is. I'm so thankful to be here in this place and to have been able to celebrate and give thanks to God for our bountiful harvest.