Well, it is true. I just got done last week with my midservice conference. That means I have completed 1 year of my 2 years down here. I don´t really have any reflections on it right now, but they might be written soon.
Besides my midservice conference, we also had All Saint's Day festivities as I already told you about. Below are some pictures of it as well as of Liam´s goodbye party (warning-don't look if you don't want to see a pig being killed).
Nov 2 people bring their decorations to mass to have them blessed. The decorations, which will be used in the cemetary, include paper machet flags, paper or fabric flowers (some are dipped in wax making them last long and look almost real), real flowers, and other plastic and paper things.
Here, people are leaving mass with their decorations in their typical baskets.
Here is part of the cemetary where I live. Some parts, as this picture shows, basically consist of a mound of dirt representing where the person was buried with a wooden but sometimes metal cross. You can see marigolds in the right-hand lower corner. They are the traditional live flower used for this day.
Other parts of the cemetary include cement structures. As I mentioned last year, it seems weird to see people standing on top of graves or playing in the cemetary. I played frisbee this year, but off to the side a bit where it was open. I had fun because there were so many little kids that whenever the frisbee went down the side of the mountain (the cementary is on top of a small mountain or big hill), the kids would run and get it. I also made an attempt at making a kite out of paper machet, a small one mind you. One worked great and proved too light and not strong enough for the wind higher in the sky. I probably had it up 100 yds when the wind snapped it in half. The other one was, well, a failure. I tried to make it out of aluminum and plastic. I basically did it because they said it could not be done. I still think it can be done, but they were right that day.
Here I wondered why the graves were not decorated very much. Well it turns out these 8 gravestones are of a family who were all killed at the same time. I was told it was a massacre of some sort, but the person telling me this did not know why it happened. I guess that explains why there is no close kin to decorate the graves.
As I think I wrote about, for Liam's goodbye party, we killed a pig. Here is the first picture of us early in the morning preparing the boiling water to skin the pig.
Hog tie.
I helped with the skinning. Of course it was already dead before this.
I was really impressed how they carved the pig. The stomach was huge (you can see the big white balloon just under the brown liver in the picture) yet we did not spill a thing from the intestines or stomach. For those of you wondering, the organ setup in the pig was quite the same as you would find it in a person.
From pig to pork chops with a special tangy sauce in 2 hours.
This is the vat of fat. We threw all the fat pieces in there as well as various organs. Eventually as the fat melted, it turned into a giant deep-frier, which we then used to deep fry everything, including some shrimp.
It's that time of year again... corn harvest time that is. This corn is being laid out to dry.
One of the gardens we planted earlier on. The bed that looks sparse already had its vegetables harvested.
