Holy Week and Stuff

This is coming at you nice and late, but I hope you enjoy.

My hope is that it tides you over until I have the next one ready.

Semana Santa

We all know about Good Friday and Easter. What some of you may not have known about was Holy Monday, Holy Tuesday, Holy Wednesday, Holy Thursday, and Holy Saturday. In Guatemala, the whole week before Easter is celebrated with much reverence. Every day there is a procession that leaves one of the churches and goes through the city. People make alfombras in the street which are then completely destroyed in a matter of two minutes.

The processions begin with a big float that has Jesus or some story from The Bible. It is carried by like 40 guys dressed in purple robes. Next there is a marching band and following the marching band is a couple guys pulling and pushing a generator-powered floodlight so the band can see its music when the darkness comes. After the band is a smaller float of Mary that essentially is carried by woman but usually there are not enough woman so men carry it.

  

      

On Holy Thursday, La Unión made an alfombra and all the students were invited to help. The alfombra (the Spanish word for carpet) was made out of colored sawdust. Once the  first layer of sawdust is down, stencils are used to make different designs on it.

This is the almost finished alfombra.

For safety reasons, the alfombra has to be kept moist. Justin was in charge of spraying the stenciled pictures with water.

We finished around 7pm and Jamie and I headed home for dinner. I went back to the school at 9:30 to watch the procession destroy the alfombra.

After the procession went by we continued with our night plans which included staying up all night looking at people make alfombras for the procession that was going to leave La Merced at 4 am. Dana, Morgan, Miguel (a friend), and I headed to La Merced to get a snack so we could have energy for the night. While we were snacking our friend Joel met up with us. The five of us hit the streets to see the alfombras that were the most beautiful ever. We laughed, we cried, and it was altogether a super fun night. At 4 am, at least two people from our group of 5 got to see the procession leave to church. Apparently, watching the procession leave is really exciting. I saw it happen, but I wasn’t as thrilled as my Guatemalan friend who was taking pictures even though he for sure had seen it happen many times before. This leads me to think that even though this whole celebration happens every year, it is a very important tradition for the people who live here.

Rumor has is there is 36 days left (Wednesday).

April 2^nd

In my opinion this day is not really worth mentioning, but some people have asked.

This Tuesday began quite beautifully because Cony made crepes for breakfast. I eat my crepes with honey and banana. It is one of my favorite meals here. After breakfast I went to my bed to do homework and I fell asleep on accident.

Now this day I decided I wanted to accomplish a few personal records:

1. Beat my personal record of number of bananas eaten in one day. Previously it was five.

2. Run to Cerro De La Cruz.

I was only going to go after the banana record if we had bananas for breakfast because that would give me a kick-start and I could finish off the record with chocobananos. Sure enough there were bananas at breakfast and I had two with my crepes. At around 11 I had my first chocobanano, bringing my count to three and it wasn’t even lunch yet. When lunch rolled around I was a little discouraged that there weren’t any bananas, but then I found some hiding in a corner. I ate a banana wrapped in a tortilla. I left for my volunteer work and brought enough money for two chocobananos. I bought on one the way there and one on the way back. Boom. Six bananas. I wanted another chocobanano that night, but the place close to our house was closed and I did not want to risk the buy at the other place recognizing me because I was buying my fourth chocobanano of the day.

Dana and I were supposed to wake up a 5:30am and run to Cerro De La Cruz. Dana did an exemplary job of waking up, but I forgot to turn up the volume on my alarm clock, so I slept until 5:45 and by then Dana decided it would be better if we went at 10 when she was done with her class. So at 10:06 we headed for the huge hill that is Cerro De La Cruz. For those of you who do not know, I hate stairs. Running up them is a bit more tolerable, but this was still super hard and sometimes I would take big, slow steps up the stairs instead of running. Dana was having some shin pain and decided it would be better if she walked up the stairs, but now we both have a new goal to get before the end of the semester!

The day after my birthday we had a meeting at Paul’s house and there was cake for my birthday. This was even more exciting because the day after that there was leftover cake.

Morgan and Dana live with Flor de Maria. Flor invited me to eat lunch with them to celebrate my birthday. It was so unexpected and so nice. She made pepian, a delicious soup thing with chicken and rice. It takes three hours to make and is gone in fifteen minutes.

Random Week of Injuries

One week Dana burned the back of her leg on a motorcycle and I fell playing soccer and got all scraped up. We got these sweet marks.