The merriest Christmas to all of you! Our lives here have been exciting, hard, dependent on others, humbling, learning from God, leaning on each other, missing home, yearning for community, learning Spanish, not understanding culture well, furnishing an empty apartment and as always, learning to love. We miss and love you all. Check it out!
It's not everyday you drive by the local Catholic church and see a spectacle of glittery costumes, marimba music, some kind of dancing. We were a little tired after a day in Antigua, but it was too much activity to not investigate. So we left our things in the car and marched up the hill hoping to make a token appearance, maybe meet a couple folks from the neighborhood, come home for the night. We arrived to find a sort dance being performed by men of all ages dressed head to toe in large bright (bright being an understatement) costumes with masks of white-looking Spaniards, a couple black folks and a bull. While the marimba band played, everyone kind of moved around and the bull would hop around and sometimes lower its horns toward a Spaniard, and once in awhile would tease someone from among the 100 or so onlookers. To quell our confusion about what was going on, we tried some ponche, a traditional Christmas-time hot drink that kind of tastes like the juice from a can of fruit cocktail with a little bit of cinnamon flavor. We accidentally ran into our Gringo pal Joe at said event, who, being 6'4" with shoulder-length blonde hair, didn't help us blend in at all. Interestingly enough, for the 30 minutes that we stood there with our styrofoam cups and our phones snapping a few pictures, no one came up to us to welcome us or tell the clearly confused Gringos what was happening. Just after sundown, the music and dancing stopped, the masks and feathered conquistador hats came off, but we still didn't quite know what had just happened. After about 5 minutes, they added a thick layer of icing to the cake of our confusion by hoisting an illuminated float with the virgin Mary on it from behind the church, carrying it up to the front, and walking it into the church. I had asked a couple people what the dance was about, and all I got was something to celebrate the Conception, but that wasn't very helpful since bulls, Spaniards and maracas didn't match my Biblical schema for the immaculate conception. So I asked one more onlooker as people were dispersing, "Que es la significa de este baile?" This produced one of the best results I could have imagined. The mother tried to talk to us about it for a little bit, but we couldn't understand everything she was saying, so she recruited her daughter, Lourdes, to help us out. Still mostly all Spanish, but she was a little easier to understand. We think she said that the dance is really just a sort of happy dance in Guatemala, maybe it represents their freedom from the Spaniards? It's something of importance that sets up the importance of the Virgin of the Conception. We're still mostly confused about the dance and how and when and why, but it was still awesome. This website was the closest explanation we could find (scroll down to "Danze de los Mexicanos"...I think"). The better part was that Lourdes, a brilliant 16-year old, invited us to walk with her as the crowds dispersed saying something about a procession and her aunt's house. So we walked with her and her cousin David (who played a bull in the dance and was still in most of his costume) a couple blocks down one of the busiest (and fumi-est) streets in Guatemala, only to find that a few blocks down, some of the guys started prancing around in some sort of a procession with the marimba guys playing while walking, having their marimbas pushed for them. Incredible. Lourdes told us all about her family, how her mom, grandma, and aunts and uncles all lived in neighboring houses. Well, that little collection of houses was where the procession ended, the guys traded their costumes for a Brahava (beer), and everyone in the extended family (and us) sat down in the patio (think courtyard) and waited for the tamales (think soggy corn meal with a chunk of bone-in chicken inside and tomato sauce on top...different than America) to be served from the kitchen by the matriarchs of the family. It was here that we met Andrea, Paola, Ann Lucia, Isabel, Nicole, Elisabet, Belen, Abi, Javier, and Tin-Tin; 10 of the 24 cousins who called this family theirs. We're talkin' ages 1-11 mostly. The "older kids" were hanging out at another table. We talked with them for a good hour and a half. It was incredible. It reminded us of DA HOOD! cause they just hung out and talked for hours and loved being with each other and had communal houses and the kids and the parents all liked eachother (mostly) and they liked food. Everytime we didn't understand something they were trying to tell us, 4 of them would chime in at once and repeat whatever was said by the other, which made it really easy to comprehend. Ha. But Lourdes helped us through (in comprehendable Spanish mostly) the conversations about sleepovers, ghost stories, Christmas traditions, fireworks, travel, weather, family, games, and more. Around 8, we said thank you to everyone and left this little side street in a neighborhood not far from ours. We had run by and driven by this little side street a number of times before and would have never in our right minds wandered back there; never would have imagined that down an alley that looks like a drug deal waiting to happen, there's a little slice of heaven. Funny how that is. |
AuthorAJ & Alaina Westendorp Archives
July 2017
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