Holy Week
Holy week in Spanish is Semana Santa which sounds to me more like Christmas (Navidad) than Easter (Pascua de Resurreccion) so I had to wrap my head around the confusion a few times before becoming more familiar with it. Holy week is celebrated here with a week of school vacation for the kids and teachers and with a half week off for other employees on the ranch. Many employees take the other half week off as vacation which means a light work week for most of the volunteers.
I took advantage of the light work week to host a few
Proyecto Familiars (Family Projects). As a reminder, this is when the
volunteers host biological siblings for dinner and games at our volunteer
house. For those with special needs on the ranch, this is sometimes changed to
making pizza and entertaining the special needs group at their house. So
Tuesday Allen and I hosted a sister and brother at San Vicente and Wednesday
Julie, Natalie, and I made pizza and danced with the group at Casa Emmanuel. I
greatly enjoy these get togethers as an opportunity to get better acquainted
with kids outside of my Hogar.
Honduras is big on re-enactments and Thursday started it off with a mass and foot washing of the 12 disciples which were played by 12 of the youngest boys on the ranch. They were dressed in white hassocks and their feet were washed by a visiting priest from the US (Minnesota).
On Friday we had a procession starting at 8AM which led to different locations where each station of the cross was re-enacted. Jesus was played by a member of the religion department. Kids, volunteers, and other employees were in costume to portray other parts of the Passion. It is quite sobering to watch a live rendition of Jesus´ suffering and death on the cross. Mass on Friday was at 3PM.
Saturday was mostly free until 6:30 when a bonfire was lit and candles were handed out for a candle light procession to the church for a Easter Vigil mass. The candles caused a few problems with the little ones. Their candles were in a plastic cup half filled with rocks to provide support to the candle. In one case, the child spilled the rocks so refilled the cup with grass which was not a great combination. The grass and plastic cup both set fire in church but were quickly blown out. In another case, a child helping another child relight their candle got the flame to close to her hair and singed her hair. Since the candles were lit for a good half hour through the procession and entry songs in church, I think we were lucky that there weren’t more incidents! The Easter Vigil mass lasted for 3 hours and I was impressed with the patience and attention of the kids.
There was an optional 7AM Easter mass before the visiting priest left to go back to Minnesota. The volunteers had a 10AM brunch to celebrate Easter morning together. It was a potluck and Allen decided to make Blueberry French Toast which is a gourmet Honduran dish (Just kidding!!) He was lucky enough to find real blueberries at the La Colonia (grocery store) in Talanga.
The kids on the ranch do not normally have colored eggs, egg
hunts, or Easter candy. I am not sure if this is even common in Honduras
although we did find an egg coloring kit in Tegucigalpa. The volunteers put
together an inexpensive activity to combine these US traditions. We cut out egg
shapes that could be colored with crayons by the kids later and taped them to
pieces of candy. Then we hid them in the park Sunday afternoon for the kids to
find. They had a great time and afterwards chased it down with some shaved ice with flavorings.
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