Dia de los Difuntos and Other Tales

Whoa. That is all I can say to describe the weekend we just had, which involved trekking for about 5 hours each way on various microbuses and chicken buses to a town called Todos Santos, where we joined in the celebration of Dia de Todos Santos (All Saints Day) and Dia de los Difuntos (Day of the Dead). We went because 1. The event is so important that Lonely Planet put a picture of the festival on the front of their guidebook, and 2. We were celebrating our first week not in Spanish school. We made the trek with Molly, and Erin and Shannon (friends we´d met through Spanish school), and I don´t know if anyone was quite ready for the range of emotions that would be experienced. In addition, the journey there had apparently worn us all out:

Todos Santos is a dry town, but on All Saints Day, everyone is drinking. Excessively. In addition, the main attraction of the festival is the horse races in which the men of the town (and apparently some gringo women... but not indigenous women...) ride the horses back and forth down a dirt road from 8am to 5pm. So here we have crowds of men in traditional dress, completely inebriated, riding horses while surrounded by a massive crowd of locals and tourists. Everything about these races is interesting and exciting, until you walk down the street and see this:

Men are scattered all around the town, having overdone it to the point of nearly killing themselves from alcohol poisoning. The result is quite heartbreaking, and many men end up in the local jail (which, by the way, is a building with bars facing to the outside where the prisoners can stick their hands out, and anyone walking by can see who is in the jail). The idea seems to be that everyone in the village can drink away their sorrows (no job opportunities, extreme poverty, discrimination, etc) for one or two days during the festival each year. Talk about a... celebration?

But, enough about the hard parts of this celebration. Let´s talk about the good things. The traditional dress is totally beautiful, there are folks playing the marimba all day long, there are ferris wheel rides, ¨fair food¨ (fried chicken, licuados, french fries, lots of Guatemalan breads, samosas, etc), and gorgeous textiles. Also, we had the chance to witness a traditional Mayan ceremony (or blessing?) that happens on the morning of All Saints Day every year, in which two women prayed for all the horse race participants and gave offerings to God:

To sum up, the weekend had its ups and downs, but was definitely worth the trip. Another highlight from the past couple of weeks is as follows:

-We attended a celebration for the new water system (they now have water in many of the homes) in a town called Santa Anita (an ex-guerilla community). About 15 minutes into the presentation, someone decided that they should have a Catholic mass, unplanned, and most of the people picked up their chairs and brought them to the church to have mass. However, not everyone in the town is Catholic, and during the mass one man tied a sign to the side of the Catholic church promoting the Evangelical church. After the mass was over (one hour later), every brought their chairs back to the water celebration presentation, as if nothing had happened, and the presentation continued.

Later in the presentation, as three girls were dancing in their traditional dress, it started to rain and all the spectators picked up their chairs and left. But the girls continued dancing.

During the celebratory meal, in which we ate the cow that we had seen hanging over the basketball court earlier in the day, we were served cups of vodka. What a celebration!