Champas and Semana Santa

Author: Alex
This week has been a challenging week for the teachers. Semana Santa, Holy Week, starts this weekend and goes through the following weekend in celebration of "Easter". We are having a school celebration this Friday which is called Cultural Day. All of the classes are building champas. Champas are small huts made from the trunks and branches of small cut trees, banana leaves and palm leaves. The champas are designed in accordance with Maya, Chorti, and other indigenous groups' designs. The students help with the construction so there have been lots of missed classes, or begging to miss classes, to the dismay of the US teachers. They are also making murals to hang in the champas. The murals are made of dried corn, black, red and white beans and other things, such as braided cloth. This Friday we begin the day at 7am with a festival that includes parents, food and I am sure there will be music. We end the festivities at 11 am, clean up and go home. It has taken 1-1/2 weeks to build the champas and they will go away on Friday. To bad we can't burn one every couple of days during Semana Santa, but we won't be at school.

For Semana Santa, people from Catholic church make alfombras (carpets). These carpets are made from sawdust and laid out and designed on the street beside the central park. We have been fortunate because our landlord and family are in charge of making the carpets and we have been invited to help. This is how it works. They acquired about 100, maybe more, large gunny sacks of sawdust. The first step was to sift the sawdust (aserrine). The sawdust needs to have all of the big chunks removed. Now that this is finished, it is time for the coloring of the sawdust. Large amounts of food coloring are used to color sawdust and whomever is coloring. The food coloring is prepared in buckets then poured over patches of sawdust and mixed together. The colors so far have been purplish-red, yellow and orange and there is still much more coloring to be done. Last night, Gilda (pronounced Hilda), our landlord, was across the street in their vacant lot which has a very tall block wall around three sides. She had her laptop and projector set up to project the images for the carpets on the wall. I went out and sat with her until she got the dimensions just right. Each image is 6 ft wide by 10 ft tall.. One of the images was of Jesus with outstretched arms. Gilda's daughter, Iann Camila, and Gilda's neice, Pamala, 6th and 4th graders, were outside as well. When Gilda went to the house to get something, the two girls began making hand puppets in the light of the image next to Jesus. I reached out my hand into the image and put my fingers up to Jesus's underarm. I began tickleing Jesus's underarm and saying "goochi goo". The girls laughed and they joined me in the tickling of Jesus. I thought about putting my finger up Jesus's nose as if to pick it, but thought that might be too sacreligious.

More on Semana Santa will be forthcoming during our holiday week next week...