A South African community northeast of Cape Town was thankful for Chester County last week.
Its Thanksgiving meal featured “leg of lamb with mint sauce, beef curry, paptert (porridge pie), Malva pudding, and cooked onion salad,” according to a Philadelphia Inquirer report by Michaelle Bond.
And it fed 30, most of whom flew from Downingtown’s Hopewell United Methodist Church to build two houses and add a sixth shipping container to the Mosaic Paarl Valley Community Center in Wellington, South Africa.
“It’s interesting; they know a lot about the United States, but we don’t know much about their country,” Hopewell member Tony Brantzeg said. “They knew about Thanksgiving. They knew Donald Trump was elected.”
The community center that Hopewell has helped to build in recent years now serves 200 children ages 3-6 for meals, games, singing, and dancing. The shipping container it added to the site was refurbished right in Downingtown before being shipped.
Read more about Hopewell’s partnership with the nonprofit Mosaic in the Philadelphia Inquirer here.
