more campo!

so more stories from campo...

the second day there we played soccer...divided up so first the women playe and then the men so the women woudn´t have pena... it was a blast, and surprisingly (we were expecting to be cruchsed) we tied, empate!

about half way through julia and i taught eduardo how to play crazy eights (or crazy eights). i think we started wednesday night. i lost everysingle game...and we played probably about 10 or something. the next morning we hiked to the top of the mountain. steep hot dusty. but then we just hung out up there for over an hour, played crazy eights some more. and eduardo brought cucumbers (5 rather large ones) lime and salt. so after a couple rounds of losing i asked for a cucumber. i peeled it with his machete and i ate it, holding the whole thing in my hand, putting lime and salt on top, and just taking huge bits out of it...lik it was a banana but not. the rounds we played while i was eating my pepino i won. so for the rest of the week we talked about my lucky pepino and esuardo would say "cris, va perder por que no tiene su pepino" ... you are going to lose because you don´t have your cucumber. and i would respond... nope, i still have it, it is still in me...

and lets just talk about that for a second. and just a preface, we talk about poop a lot here. it is just part of life, and an important part because if you poop normal it´s kind of a big deal... and if you are not, well it´s nice to know everyone else here understands and shares your pain. so anyway, i´m inviting you to http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42197join this conversation about the poop side of life: here we go. i pooped twice the whole week we were in the campo. once teusday and once sunday morning (easter --such a good gift! .. though a part of me wished i could have waited til i was back to a flushing toilet instead of a latrine... but you know asi es la vida...). so my luckjy pepino was with me wednesday on, though honestly it didn´t do me much good and i my losing streak started up again. and the toilets: they had a special kind of latrine that was two "toilets"so you use obne until the hole beneath it gets filled up, switch to the other, wait a year i think and then mix it up and use it as fertilizar. now the things is that only poop is good for fertilizar, the pee would mess it up. htis means that the "toilets" look pretty funny... i really meant to take a picture, but i never remembered to take the camera with me to the bathroom. but so the latrine is made of cement and the back half goes straight down like a normal porta potty thing (though much less smelly cause you put like sand and lyme in after every time you poop) and then the front half was like a ement cylinder into a plastic black tube that took the pee to another little bit different place... so proabably more than you wanted to know, but part of life. it´s probably funny but just about everytime i use the bathroom (especially when it is actually in a toilet...) i just think of my interreligious dialogue class and how rabbi white said part of one of the traditional jewish prayers thanks God for the ability to go to the bathroom, and i do the same.

and back to easter! holy week traditions here are beautiful. there´s the traditional holy thursday last supper washing of the feet. on friday there are stations of the cross and then a mass, and then an easter vigil on sautrday night. but there´s a huge difference, especially in the campo: everything is at least an hour walk away. 4 cantones (hamlets) celebrate the easter season together and so each canton hosts a different day. carasque where i was this year had palm sunday, which was before we got there, so everything else was a quite a walk. my favorite parts. we did live stations of the cross, walking outside in the hot dust, with a pick-up driving behinf the whole crowd with a megaphone, the readers speaking into wireless mikes at each station. and for each station they had a little poster on a tall stick (i might have a picture... i´ll see) and they would tell the story of the station and then they would prayer these beautiful prayers. the one i remember the best is the one where the strip Jesus of his clothes and they prayed, Lord we too have been stripped of the little we have. OUr jobs, money food... even our human dignity (plus a little mre) Lord Here our prayer... and then the would continue: Lord at times we have taken the dignity and the little of other, Forgive us Lord forgive us. Abnd some of the women who walked an hour to walk an hour and half in the stations were old and would kneel in the dust at each station.

saturday day we spenet at the river. this tradition on hoy saturday to go to water and just have fun. we played and plashed and it was so fun. lydia brought tamales for lunch, chicken tamales. and they were good except they don´t take the bones out of the chicken before putting the chicken in the tamales! and so the inside of one of my tamales was a whole chicken foot! wacala (yuck)! ..i quitely took it out and his it under a rock in the beach. i may be soemthing less than a fan of chicken tamales...



my other favorite part was on the way to the easter village it was dark and it´s el salvador and the mass was supposed to start at 7 so of course we left the house at 7 and were walking and we take a short cut of the road through the trees and brush and walk and walk and walk and walk and we get finally down to the river, a little bit before the bridge and we see these flashlights behind us. it was so beautiful: ileas (who is about 6 and lived in carasque and just shines really...) and matt (a jesuit novice) and several families and we just all met up crossed the bridge, left the road again and are walking single file along the river with four flashlights, some times in silence and soemtimes laughing and sometimes running to catch up, in the night with these four lights bobbing around. and i felt so at peace to be in the procession, and completely unatease thinking that this is what it was like during the war when they had to abandon their homes and take to the mountains to avoid being slaughtered by the army. this is like that... but at the same time this is completely different: we hve light and we can laugh and talk and we are not walking in fear. and so it was peaceful and ghostly. and how ppropriate that those deaths and that fear should be remembered and walked in the night after Christ died. Marcel says that hope only is when despair is possible. the image of those four lights in the safe darkness i can still see when i close my eyes ... and how corny does that sounds, but they talk corny here, and it´s true.

more pictures...

oops... i don´t have my campo pictures on my flash drive so instead i´m going to put up some pictures of my kids and me ! (all of these are my kids except the third from the bottom which is a picture of the youth group that meets every daturday evening... but it´s the room where we have engish class...)