3rd All Saint's Day, but nothing ordinary still

Well of course I had to slip in something in my last weeks as a volunteer, something that I had wanted to do just about my entire time but something that can only be done on November 1, All Saint's Day. That something was really far away. If I had gone the entire way by bus, it probably would have taken about 16 hours to get there, so I guess you can understand why it was not the first thing I jumped at to do. That something was going to a town called Todos Santos (All Saints in English) in Huehuetenango where rightly so, they have their patronal town fair on Nov. 1. One of the most unique events that they do is on the 1rst, they hold a sort of horse race, though it might better be called a survival run since there is no real race track and there is no winner. It is a pagan ritual they have been doing since old time for the survival of their community. Basically men train and prepare all year long, something verly costly and time consuming, just for one day. On the first, they dress up, as you will see in the photos, in special clothing, different from their already special normal ware that everyone in that town wears. In the morning on a closed off section of dirt road padded with sand about the length of a football field and a half, they race their horse at full speed. They do this for hours. They leave exhausted and sometimes battered from falling off. There are even people who die doing this. Hopefully the pictures will explain even more this special event.



Oh, so I realized I did not explain how I got their. Well on the way up, a boyfriend of a volunteer drove us up. It saved a lot of time, but unfortunately we were 6 people in the back of a small pickup with our stuff. And of course, it has not rained in months, but what did it do, it poured. It rained so hard that when we got to the town we were going to stay in the first night (we stayed about 2 hours away from Todos Santos to break up the trip and because its really cold and a bit expensive to stay there during the festive weekend) they closed off the roads because the main road was flooding and cars going by were pushing even more rain into the houses, or at least that is the explanation that the guy gave us who was so nicely blocking off the only road with his two cars so that no one could get through. We got through an hour later. So we had fun. Luckily the next day got sunny so we could dry everything out. It still rained (though this time we brought a rain slick) the next day going up to Todos Santos, which sits quite high up at 2700 meters in elevation. Surrounding peaks stand at about 3700 meters, so it's pretty cold. The 31st we had a Halloween Party and my sitemate and I dressed up as "Joe"; unfortunately I do not have a photo available. The next morning was the race and guess who was there... the US ambassador. And guess who got a ride all the way to the capital in the ambassador's fleet along with 7 others. :) That gesture certainly was not necessary. He went all the way to drop all 8 of us off wherever we needed to go making sure that we were getting back safely, even though it probably cost him almost 2 hours extra. He even made us brownies! I was even more thankful as the whole way there it poured, and I would have been in the back of the truck in it all. Without saying, I was very thankful. And thanks to you all for paying your taxes.




I'll get to the Nov. 1 pictures, but first, here are some pictures of my last days of work.



My last produce exchange...

Locuats are in season!

fruits and roots from my community
vegetables from the mountain

Group picture before the mountain women leave back to their town with their newly trades fruits and roots.

HIV/AIDS session with the women and nurse of the health center... well, this is afterward. I forgot to take a picture during the session. The women are holding up cards of the role they had to play when we acted out how HIV can enter the body and how it can cause AIDS.

Here begin the pictures from Todos Santos:

Here's me with my sitemate (Nicole's taking over my place), another volunteer and her boyfriend. Her boyfriend, Josue (Joshua) is the guy that gave us the ride from the capital to Todos Santos... I thank God for him. As the picture suggests, "Super Delicious Smoothies anyone?"

Fooseball is at all the town fairs


Marimba time... as you can see, the typical dress for the men includes striped red pants and a blue/purple jean jacket. Here only one of the men is wearing the typical hat.

Stray dogs rallying just before the race.

The race....

This person was one of the first people to get injured. Luckily he was not trampled to death.

Proof that I was there.

One of the oficial master of the ceremony. He's holding up horse traffic. Sometimes though the riders get so into it that they just ignore these oficials. I mean to the rider's defense, if I were riding at 100% for hours on end, I would probably daze out a couple of times too.

It's good to know we are protected everywhere. Here you can get a good look at the typical dress of the men including the hat worn by men and women.

I try not to think about if one of the those horses would have come at me... the rickety fency would have protected me for sure.







Another casualty

Typical fair goodies.

The town center and church during the fair

Dinner with the nuns in Alzatate. I ordered pizza, but from Jalapa, but the cook forgot to make it, so steak it was.

The other end of the table.

Mid-service

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.