So Much Thanks to International Friends

Tomorrow, I have a German exam… it’s not quite the way I envision a perfect Thanksgiving.  Yet there are so many things to be thankful for.

german courtyard

  1. I am thankful for witnessing the strength of the Vietnamese girl who sits next to me in German class.  We are the same age.  She recently became a single mother to her three-year-old.  She speaks German as well as me (ie barely) and has no family here.
  2. I am admiring the tolerance of the Turkish girl who sits beside us.  She worked in a sock factory for seven years before she married a Turkish man who runs a kabob stand here.  She moved to Germany two years ago.  She is 23.
  3. I am valuing the friendship of these girls even though we can barely communicate.  We can laugh and smile.  They can show me pictures on their cell phones and gasp when I tell them I don’t have a cell phone.
  4. I am thankful for passing around the food we bring with one another.  They are often shocked by the things I snack on like raw almonds.  And when I was eating a regular old mushroom from the grocery store, the Vietnamese girl panicked.  She thought I was poisoning myself.  Over and over, she kept telling me that I had to cook the mushrooms first.  I said it was okay to eat raw.  I patted her hand.  She shouted for the teacher.
  5. And tomorrow, instead of sitting down to turkey and mashed potatoes, I’ll be sitting with these girls.  They don’t even know what they’ve taught me.  But if they could understand the American Thanksgiving tradition of tomorrow, I would tell them thank you because I am so thankful to know them.

Have you found yourself being thankful in a non-traditional way or for non-traditional things this season?

(Image of a German courtyard from about a week ago)