Easter Week

Easter here is a pretty big deal and includes a full week and a day of vacation for all government employees and schools. The week is called Semana Santa (Saint's Week) and was quite busy.

On Saturday (March 27), I rode back to my site with a new volunteer who now lives in a town of my county. The volunteer, Megan, is a rural health volunteer and in a small town (bigger than mine though), about 40 minutes away from me. Once she gets settled and goes to her second set of training (in two months), we could end up working on some projects together. It is cool to feel like a mentor and show her around a little bit.

Sunday was Palm Sunday, which is celebrated here with a procession through my pueblo (like a county head), with lots of palm leaves. The procession ends in the church with a seemingly normal mass. The coolest part was the quantity of palm leaves that everyone had and that the color of the palms matched the color of the walls of the church.

On Tuesday there was a long procession called Via Cruces (Cross Path), up to La Montañona (a tiny town in the middle of the nearest mountain, which also is a protected forest). There are 14 stages along the walk that apparently reenact the path that Jesus took to the cross. For me it was more about spending the day walking with friends from my community up to a beautiful pine forest. Everyone had kept telling me that they were going to take me up there during the summer (of which we only have a few weeks more), and not once had we gone. Aside from realizing how much I missed forests and appreciating the smell once again, I also had a really interesting historical/cultural experience. This area was heavily affected by the war and many of the guerilla troops made tunnels in the mountain to live in, maintain the radio, and use as a hospital. A number of these tunnels are now open to the public and you can go in and see how some of these people lived. They were hot, small, dark, and being in them really gave me a perspective on how tough the war was on the people in this area (as war always is). Hopefully I'll be getting some photos up soon.

On Thursday Carol (one of my good friends and fellow volunteer that most of you know), made the 6-hour trek from her site up to mine. We spent the afternoon walking around my site, although it doesn't take much time to see everything. Friday morning was a smaller version of Via Cruces in my community, which happened at many houses with altars along my main road. Seeing as this has been happening every Friday for the last month here it wasn't new for me, but it was something that Carol hadn't seen.

Saturday night was the night of the Easter mass, a mass that started at 10:00 PM and ended just a little after midnight. The first hour was in candlelight (everyone brought candles and there was a ceremony outside of the church before the mass to light all of them), and had a darker and somber feel to it. Then the second hour recounted the resurrection and there was jubilation with lights turning on and peppier songs. Aside from being extremely late at night and much longer than a normal mass, it was an interesting event to see.

Seeing as Thursday through Saturday are days when no one is supposed to work or really do anything besides sit around (no music aside from religious, no fishing, no excursions, etc), Sunday becomes the day of festivities. A number of Felipe's family, Carol, and I went to the closest river for the day. It was a pretty typical river day with lots of playing in the water and a lunch. The biggest difference was that we went by foot (about 2 hours one direction on quite steep slopes), and thus were quite wiped out when we arrived back home in the evening.

Today (Monday) is still technically vacation around here, but things will be returning back to normal tomorrow. I have quite a bit of catching up to do in the school since I was not in my site for a week and a half and then we had a week of vacation. And my health promoter (Nubia) and I working on starting a youth group this week to talk about life planning. If you are on Facebook, look for photos in from this past week in the near future.