Ramadji’s Blog

Yep, it’s Thanksgiving here in the United States. It’s an old tradition celebrsted by American family at the of November each year. In other countries, people don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. I have recently learned through a Yusuke Kuwuhara, a Japanese friend of mine, that Christian South Korean do celebrate Thanksgiving. It probably got over there with Christianity. Anyway, before I tell how my experiences with that celebration, let me give soem historical background about Thanksgiving. So, what is the history behind Thanksiving anyway? Well, throughout the history of Humanity, people have celebrated at different times and for different reasons. The Greek, the Egyptians, the Chinese,the Hebrews, the Roman…. have had some sort of celebration to thank the deities for all sorts of reasons. To make the story short, as far as Thanksgiving is concerned in America, the lines below picked up at http://www.holidays.net/thanksgiving/story.htm explain all. “In 1621, after a hard and devastating first year in the New World the Pilgrim’s fall harvest was very successful and plentiful. There was corn, fruits, vegetables, along with fish which was packed in salt, and meat that was smoke cured over fires. They found they had enough food to put away for the winter.The Pilgrims had beaten the odds. They built homes in the wilderness, they raised enough crops to keep them alive during the long coming winter, and they were at peace with their Indian neighbors. Their Governor, William Bradford, proclaimed a day of thanksgiving that was to be shared by all the colonists and the neighboring Native American Indians. 

The custom of an annually celebrated thanksgiving, held after the harvest, continued through the years. During the American Revolution (late 1770’s) a day of national thanksgiving was suggested by the Continental Congress.

In 1817 New York State adopted Thanksgiving Day as an annual custom. By the middle of the 19th century many other states also celebrated a Thanksgiving Day. In 1863 President Abraham Lincoln appointed a national day of thanksgiving. Since then each president has issued a Thanksgiving Day proclamation, usually designating the fourth Thursday of each November as the holiday. ” That’s pretty clear as background information about Thanksgiving. For more detail, go to http://www.historychannel.com/exhibits/thanksgiving/main.html and learn more. Pretty fascinating.
Now, let me talk about my Thanksgiving since I have been living in the United States for almost three years.
I have been blessed to meet the Letsons when I moved to Rochester, New York in August 2002. Thamks to my Indiana University Professor, Vinnie Palozzi who is from Rochester, NY, I met Tim, Linda, and their beautiful daughters Faith, Hope, and Joy ( Have you noticed the names? Really meaningful huh?) at a BBQ thrown at Vinnie’s parents home. We met there after our friendship started. They consider me as part of their family and I feel the same way towards them. They regularly invite me to their place in Avon, NY and I really love it. In 2002 and 2003, they invited me to join them for Thanksgiving and it was great. I had a lot of fun and good time with their family. I have also got to meet with Tim’s parents who are really awesome people.
In the tradition of Thanksgiving, people always have Turkey in the menu. There are also pumkin pie, cake, drinks, games and prayers of course. After eating, everybody takes turn to share with the others what they are thankful tha year. It’s a tradition and every American family that celebrates Thanksgiving goes through it. It’s great to see people travel miles and miles to have family reunions and praise the Lord for His blessings. It’s really a family tradition and I always feel blessed to be part of that experience. Each year, I say thaks to God for all His blessings. I am grateful for coming to the United States to do my Masters’ Of Science through a Fulbright scholarship. I would have never reach the coasts of America if it wasn’t that blesseing through the Fulbright. Each year, I am also grateful to God for keeping me alive. After scaping death three times in my life ( 1984: black September, 2000: beating by soldiers, 2001: beating during a demonstration against the results of the fraudulent Presidential election in Chad), I feel seriously blessed to be alive. Many of my people got slaughtered, arrested, tortured murdered and dumped in the Logone and Chari Rivers. Many of my love ones disappeared and my family will never find their remains. For example I have learned a few months ago that my dad older brother who got nightly kidnapped by the Chadian secretly police (DDS) during black September 1984 was thrown out from a plane when being moved from Moundou to NDjamena by the current ruler of Chad, General Idriss Deby. We will never recover even his bones to give him a decent burial. Never! It hurts me a lot but what else can my family and I do? Not much except fight for a better Chad and Justice to come one day. If Justice doesn’t come duringmy lifetime, I have a dream that it will come for future generations so that they don’t have to liv with the horrors I have seen and been through in my childhood and throughout my life. I will never forget those images and they will stay with me for the rest of my days on earth. I don’t want anybody to experience something like that. Anyway, being alive today is a real blessing and a luck for me and my family and I give thanks to the Lord everytime the opportunityy is given me. So, on each Thanksgiving I have celebrated, I have always praised God.
This year 2004, things have been really tought and rough for me and my family back home. We have had so many losses. July, August,September, October and November have been very tough months for me. Losing people I loved has been really hurtful and I am trying to recover from all that. For the losses back home in Chad, being far from home doesn’t make things easy for me, especially during situations of losses. So, I didn’t really have seriously plans for Thanksgiving. Yes, a friendof mine from IUB had planned to join me for Thanksgiving but I decided to be alone, fast and pray so that God may help me and my family. I have been feeling really depressed and stressed for the recent months and I needed to really connect to God and ask Him to intervene. So, I decided unilaterally to ask my friend to not come over. She is mad at me for my decision. I understood her reaction full of anger but I needed to spend sometime alone. Also, I am not really fun to hang out with recently because of what I am going through So, I don’t want to have a friend over to my place and feel depressed and be cold towards that person.
Anyway, I planned to do nothing on Thanksgiving 2004 except praying and fasting. I started fasting and praying the Sunday preceding Thanksgiving . I am stopping this Sunday, Nov. 28th. I really didn’t plan to go out, especially with my car being down right now. However, my friend Jill from Browncroft Community Church emailed me to ask me to join her family on Thanksgiving day. Before Jill, Julie, another friend from BCC invited me to join her and her family in Indianapolis, IN during Thanksgiving but I declined the offer because I was planning to be in DC for a demonstration on December 1, 2004 in front of the Chadian Embassy. Then, Jill, came and offer to take me to her family’s place around here in the Rochester area on Thanksgiving. Those awesome girls didn’t want me to lock my self up in my room on Thanksgiving basically. I finally accepted to join Jill and her family.
 

My name is Ramadji. I am a Fulbrighter from Chad (Africa) living in the United States. Welcome to my blog!

I have decided to set up this blog as my online journal. It will help me keep track of my ideas. Sometimes, my head boils of neat ideas, beautiful rhymes, ideas fo projects, just thoughts about live and what not….somw of those times, I just can’t write them down because I happen to have no notepad near me or I happen to be far away from my computer. So, I do hope this blog comes at the right time to help me out. It will definitely allow me to express my joys, my fears, my pains, my deceptions, my projects, my dreams, my thoughts…. I will use it to give my opinion about love, hatred, religions, existence, racism, dictatorship, activivism, politics, international issues, computer related questions, Human Rights, Freedom, Democracy, Africa, the U.S.A, the world, depression, homesickness,….basically anything of interest to me. Yes, I will use it to discuss about anything I would like to discuss and bring other bloggers to join the debate if they would like to. That’s in substance the idea behind Ramadji’s Blog !

It’s my blog but you can make it yours by participating! I love writing and writing is my drug, my therapy when things go down. Writing keeps me alive and I enjoy it. I can’t stop it !