Holy week and elections

Well, I´ve finally added some new pictures. The reason for the delay was that I had loaned my memory card to the daughter of one of the community members. She had to make some recordings of herself teaching a literacy class and then make a CD of that. It ended up taking longer than I thought, which means I didn´t get any pictures of holy week. Oh well! The pictures are from a political rally this past weekend, as well as my decorated house. The others are from a Saturday morning when I was letting the kids take pictures around the yard.

Anyway back to Semana Santa (holy week) which was more like holy 3 days. On Maunday Thursday there was a mass which followed the normal schedule except that there were 10 guys up front who all had one of their feet washed by the priest. On Good Friday was the Via Cruces, a reenactment in 10 scenes of Jesus' week from Palm Sunday to the crucifixion. The scenes took place at various points around the village square. The only problem was the lack of microphones which made it hard to hear especially since some of the actors were a bit shy and quiet.

Plus it was pretty cold and rainy, which I guess was good since it put you in a sadder frame of mind for the proceedings. I felt bad for the Jesus actor and the other 2 guys on the crosses since they were basically striped down to their boxers which had to have been pretty cold (I was cold wearing my winter jacket). The easter service was Saturday evening as opposed to Sunday, and about 10 kids were baptized that day too (I think people wait for a special holiday to baptize so there was a wide age range in the kids). So that was holy week in my town.

The political rally was not real different from ones at home, except for the fact that between speakers a song would be played and all the canidates on stage would start dancing. I think this is a tradition that should be started in the states, it would make the debates more fun. Anyway the canidates all got up and talked about how they were going to improve the roads and the schools and give lots of money to the local women's groups for training. What was more interesting were the hecklers in the crowd who would yell out things like "you´ve been saying you´ll build that road for 20 years and it hasn't happened yet!", and other things along those lines. I guess politics is the same everywhere, they promise all kinds of things and then when they get into office they just try to make as much money as possible for themselves. We'll see what happens after these elections.