Holy Week Festivities

Here are a couple of pictures of what I've been up to- making bread for Holy Week, an Easter egg hunt, lily pads on Rio Dulce (outside of Livingston), and me and my friends in the ruins of Tikal.

Hope everybody had a wonderful Easter! Like all the other holidays I’ve experienced thus far in Guate, this Easter was very different, but good. First of all, Semana Santa (Holy Week), or Palm Sunday through Easter Sunday, is a HUGE deal here. No school all week, and most businesses close on Thursday. Monday I was invited by my host Dad’s family to make bread with them. And did we every make bread! My host Dad’s mom has a big adobe oven, so she invited me, my host mom, and then her two sisters-in-law to bake. It’s a Holy Week tradition here to make a special kind of bread from whole wheat flour, which they grind themselves. They also add cream from their cows, the end result being pretty delicious! So they taught me to make that, and I taught them to make banana bran bread. We even added blackberries! Who would have imagined it- blackberries in March!

Tuesday I had a “cultural exchange” with a bunch of the women in my group. A fellow volunteer, who’s been here a year already, told me that she’d done an Easter egg hunt with her ladies last year. It sounded like a good time to me, so I bought about 7 dozen eggs (I think the check-out lady at the store thought I was nuts…) and some food coloring and made a huge batch of sugar cookies. And it turned out to be quite a success, if I don’t say so myself! I don’t know how many people showed up, but there were a lot. We dyed the eggs and let them dry, then locked all the kids in the casita (the house that the ladies have their meetings in) while the moms and grandmothers hid the eggs. The kids had so much fun finding the eggs that they insisted on making the señoras search for eggs once they’d finish. We finished up snacking on sugar cookies and some traditional Guatemalan food for semana santa, including dulce de platano (sweetened, cooked platanos) toreja (platano cooked with bread and milk) and tamal (kind of like polenta but eaten with beans or cheese).

Then I took advantage of my four day weekend to do a bit of traveling with some fellow PCVs. We headed to Livingston, a town on the eastern coast of Guate. It’s only reachable by boat, and has a very distinct feel because part of the population is descended from Africans who somehow got left there during the slave trade. It’s famous for its seafood and punta, which is a type of music with a distinct African beat. Then we went north to El Peten, where we visited some ancient Mayan ruins in the national park Tikal- amazing! But it was incredibly hot and humid. After walking around the park all day, we went for a swim in the lake. So refreshing! I’ve only swam in salt water since I got to Guate, and I’d forgotten how much better fresh water is!

So now it’s back to work. I’ve really been getting on my ladies to get their compost piles going, and offering up my labor to encourage them. My goal is that every lady in my group will have their compost pile started by the end of this month- we’ll see how that goes. It’s been raining quite a bit this week, and everybody is saying that “winter” is coming early this year. So strange, they call it winter because it’s the half of the year during which it’s going to rain every day. But to me it feels like spring, April showers bring May flowers! I’m excited to get my own garden started- my host parents sound like their game to help me, so hopefully it can be a joint project. Because there’s a lot of grass to dig up, and no rotatiller!