I hope everyone had as wonderful a Christmas as I did! This whole week has actually been pretty great…
Monday: on my last day of work before the holiday vacation, I completed 2 of the 3 Peace Corps community analysis tools with my group in Trigales.
Tuesday: I met up with Noor in Quiché and we went to Chichicastenango (about 30 minutes away) for their feria. I was pretty sure that that was the last day of their tradition where men attach themselves to this massive pole and fly around it, but it turned out that it was one of the only days that week they weren’t doing it! It was still quite a fun daytrip and I of course managed to drop a bunch of quetzales on Christmas gifts for myself and my host family :)
Wednesday: I was violently ill and spent the day in bed reading and watching movies…which wasn’t too bad once I stopped feeling like death.
Thursday: daytrip to Uspantan to help pick out animals for our American-style Christmas feast.
Then the holiday celebrations began! Friday was Noche Buena (aka Christmas Eve), which here is more important than Christmas day itself. I went to Uspantan to spend the evening with Stephen and Mary and a family they are friendly with to get the real Guatemalan experience…and what an experience! The night began with dinner and hanging out, followed by Catholic mass and incredible fireworks immediately after – though we were at most 50 feet away from where they were setting them off! Then we headed back to their house to wait until midnight, when literally the whole town set off fireworks in sync…as Mary said, it looked like a news reel from the Gaza Strip with all the bomb-like noise and lights! We set off our own cohetes (little fireworks) and estrellitas (sparklers) and succumbed to the tradition of eating tamales and drinking ponche (like a hot fruit punch). The war-zone feeling continued during the walk home across town, this time accompanied by bolos (drunks) in the street and a serious stomach ache from everything I’d eaten!
As I mentioned previously, yesterday we had a more American-style celebration, though with a Guatemalan twist: we (not me) actually killed our dinner! With all the neighborhood kids watching outside the gate, Stephen and Cara first did the rabbit and then the duck…I thankfully missed some of the more gruesome parts while searching for firewood. Stephen swore that rabbit was the best meat he’d ever had (it was at his house during training that we watched the murder of a rabbit and chicken), and maybe I just felt bad for the little guy, but I didn’t like it that much. The duck, however, was fantastic. It ended up taking forever to cook and we didn’t dig into it until after dessert, but we literally attacked it…think Dee and Charlie with “the hunger” in that It’s Always Sunny episode!
Now that Christmas has gone and went, December and the year are almost over! Wednesday we head to Chichi to pick up the new cell phones Peace Corps is issuing us, and then back to Panajachel and the lake for New Years. It seems like most of my training class will be there, so I can’t wait!
some of the craziness in Chichi
me, Mary, and the family with our sparklers at midnight
Mary’s dog Mojito playing with our Christmas duck while it was still alive
the rabbit cooking on the fire pit
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