Ladies Christmas Party

A few times a semester we have a "Ladies Night" where just the women get together, have dinner, some kind of teaching that is maybe particularly relevant for women, and then a Question/Answer time for all the random questions you have when you're 18-22. Since it's Christmas time we decided to have a Christmas Party for our Ladies Night. They had one last year and the women really enjoyed it (so I'm told, I wasn't yet in Iasi).

About 20 women came, a mix of Christians and non-Christians, including several new people who were brought by friends. We started off with a lovely classy dinner. The icing on this dinner was that some of the guys from our church were waiters for the evening. Which may not seem like a big deal, but in most of these (African and Asian) cultures it is ABSOLUTELY UNHEARD OF for men to serve women like this. Seriously seriously. But I think both the guys and the girls got a kick out of it.

One of the activities of the evening was making Human Christmas Trees. This was great fun because the teams were divided up randomly (yay meeting new people!), each team had to choose a representative before knowing what the game was, and it's just totally ridiculous and silly. Here are some pictures of my team (from Zimbabwe, Malaysia, and Nigeria), ladies in the process of decorating, and the final products.

We also had a nice time decorating sugar cookie cutouts. I wasn't sure how this would go over, since it's one of those activities people find either lame or awesome. Oh but wow these women enjoyed it a TON. People really got into it, and I think they found it really novel. Then there was Erin and I who just slapped on some icing, threw on some sprinkles and ate ate ate. I think four was a little much, but hey, in the moment it seemed SO RIGHT.

The evening finished with a few hours of Charades and Signs, stretching the part to a whopping SIX HOURS. This kind of thing is SO up my alley, extrovert that I am. It was definitely great to come together and have fun and be silly and girly over this Christmas season. And just because I love her so much (and because she has the greatest accent ever as a Nigerian Londoner), I will close with a photo from the evening of me with my dear friend Tomi.