Death and US Embassy

February 29, 2008

Well there are quite a lot of random stories to convey in this entry. There have been quite a few events that have gone on in the past week. Death of a member of my counterparts household, pending stepping down of my counterpart as prez of ADESCO, worms, me messing up washing clothes, funerals, raw eggs and iguana meat, doctrinal classes, and a trip to the embassy. Whew, good stuff.

Padre Tino Killing ants on the phone while Im waiting.

The Ant Dance by Padre Tino in the "Rectory"

Ok, so I’ll start with the ADESCO meeting Sunday where Don Mauricio, my counterpart because he is prez of the ADESCO, is going to step down first of April. Well, wonderful. That means we have to organize the community to elect a new one, as well as find someone with the energy to work for the community. He is the only one on the directive of the ADESCO that really has the desire to develop the town more. I hope that he will change his mind, but it doesn’t look like it. So that is going to be hectic coming in the end of March. In addition to the normal meeting though, where we discussed our 43 dollar gain out of the beach trip, haha…cracks me up, I brought him WORMS. We have some worms in our training center in San Vicente, and I had brought some to Don Mauricio because an animal that is similar to a possum got into his box and ate’em all up….mmmmmm good. Sad though, he had a ton. He planted some tomato plants with this soil and they already have some goodies on them :) Yea, so I had a little bucket full of cow manure and put some dark earth on top with the barely alive worms that I had, but they all crawled down to love on the smelly stuff. Ahahahahaha. So once that gets going, I plan on spreading that around the ADESCO….it’s good dirt. Little buggers.

The end of the Funeral Mass.

The Hearse....haha.

Us heading down main street toward the cemetery after the Mass.

On a smaller note, I found out that I’m still an ignant. Homer didn’t help any. D’oh! Apparently, I have been washing my clothes with this hard hand soap stuff for 3 months. Mia culpa, mia culpa, mia grande culpa. My bad. The other stuff works much better.

The next day I worked most of the day translating some documents for our American Embassy Community Fair, and went to bed about 1130. I got a phone call at about 1145 from Don Mauricio just as I fell asleep telling me his wife’s dad had just died. He was in his 90s and was always hanging out when I visited there with Felicita, Mauricio’s wife, taking care of him. His name was Isidoro Mendez Perez. It was a sad day or two, but I really learned a lot about the culture and death in general in the process. Just as I got off the phone the bells went off here in our little town church, apparently Don Raul had gotten the call just before me (Isidoro was Don Raul’s Uncle, his 83 year old dad’s bro). For a quick deal on the bells here, to save you the Catholic aside, here usually an hour before Mass, 30 mins, 15 mins, and a minute or two before, the bells are rung all at the same time for a few mins to let everyone know to come. However, when the bells go off slowly, and one at a time, it is a notice that someone has just died, and a petition of prayer. These were the bells that went off just as I got off the phone with Don Mauricio inviting me to his house the next day for the ‘vela’ they call it, ‘wake’ I thing would be the appropriate translation. That night, many of the neighbors came and started the prayers and vigil, and throughout the day they all visited. I left with the Lopez fam that night about 8pm to walk down the ridge to their house. We arrived to I don’t know at least 125 people hanging out all over, and others stuffed in the house singing. I left my camera on purpose, but it would have been a good shot on arrival. As most of their house is in the open, they had the coffin propped up on stilts with flowers around it and four tall candles on the corners with a large crucifix behind the head. The whole time there were two guys alternating reading Scripture, and then they would sing a song. Apparently that had been going on all day. Now thinking about it, it reminds me of the scene in the Brother’s Karamazov, where they stood by the body of their abbot, reading the Gospels for a day after his death. Anyways, they eventually ended with the Our Father and a Hail Mary and then the fam served everyone donuts and coffee. Hah, weren’t expecting that were you! Hey prayers are expensive! Haha.

Lowering the guy down.

Down in the hole.

Anyways, I offered the next morning to help did the hole, but when I got there they had like 7 people and it was already mostly dug (its crowded there in the cemetery… I’ll leave it at that). I checked out the last part and headed up the hill to finish the preps for the embassy today. At 1:30pm, they left from their house about 20 minutes below my house to walk the coffin from there to the parish church. I got to the church just as the 3 musicians did and dallied on the guitar for a sec in the church with them til the coffin got there a few minutes before 3pm. People led prayer until the priest got there and then we did our Mass thing and then loaded the coffin in the truck and walked it through town to the cemetery. There we all helped to maneuver it to the hole, then I took pics at the behest of Don Mauricio. I then watched them fill the hole. There was something powerful about watching an 83 year old younger brother shoveling dirt in the hole of his 93 year old brother. It was a good experience overall, I was surprised by the community aspect of it all, but I’m not sure why, and as well as the fact that it’s a much lighter atmosphere that you will usually find in America.

The Fam afterwards.

The final drum roll.

Oh yeah, so also this day, I got to try some interesting foods. For lunch, Nina Delfina, in the house where I do internet, made me a juice drink and wouldn’t tell me what was in it. She made me guess, and I guessed oranges and cream. Wrong. Orange juice and raw eggs. Yummmmy. They got a kick out of my face after being told. It actually wasn’t bad, it tasted like an orange creamsicle. And later for dinner, I ate with the Padre and his people, and we had iguana eggs and meat. You had to bite the tip off and then suck out the inner part, that actually wasn’t bad either.


Well, I just realized that somehow I deleted all of what I had originally written for the rest of this entry. I went to post it today and saw that I was missing the whole embassy part. Wonderful. So now you get the abbreviated version.


Continuing, after the food deal, I went that evening to drop off the last of the stuff for the embassy in the rectory and walked into a doctrinal formation class that Tino was giving to all the leaders of the community catechesis groups…small assemblies I think they call them. I tried to just chill in the back when I came around the corner, but I got called to the front of course, and had to sit in the front pew and listen to the end of the talk. They held nothing back on the padre, man. One lady would throw out a couple verses to get her point across, then Tino would temper it with a different verse, and then they would all discuss for a while, and end with ‘thank you padre.’ Haha. Crazy people. It was enjoyable…I might have to go back, they get together once a week I believe. They have also started the doctrinal classes for ages kinder to 15 in the parish. All the kids in the town meet in their assigned places, and each canton meets in their little church on Sundays to give catechesis to the kids. They have a pretty good little system.

Finally, my trip to the embassy. I was up at 3:55am yesterday morning after going to bed at midnight because of translation stuff, only to miss the bus by about 10 seconds haha. So I walked up to the town in time for the 6am Mass, breakfast with Padre Tino, printed some things out at Nina Delfinas, and then we headed out to switch cars with the nuns because someone stole Tino’s license plate, and pick up Sergio, and Dr. Herrera. Although on that note, I met a little old lady that morning that told me that she wakes up at 3 every morning and prays different things until 5 and then she makes her way to the church. I’m not sure why she told me that, but she seemed surprised to see me at a daily sunrise mass (haha, shes right, normally I’m sound asleep).

Our table of honor.

Anyways, Sergio, ex mayor and vice prez of the committee that runs of the reconstruction funds, checked my Spanish on the powerpoint, and then after picking up the Doctor we made the hour trip to San Sal. Padre Tino is a crazy driver! Its that latino blood. I need to learn to drive stick shift better in case Im ever in an emergency here, :) We finally got to the embassy and made it inside an outer parking lot after inspection of our vehicle, and then at a different station after they checked out my computer and took everyone’s cell phones (they forgot mine haha) and we went through the security sensors and met up with our contact inside. I couldn’t help but laugh when she tried to talk to my group in English…I mean…really. I was surprised by some of the lack of Spanish of the personnel, but some were ok. They led us to our table, and we set up some and found some shade. We were actually the smallest scale people there…for example we were there with mostly international organizations like Habitat for Humanity that were trying to get people to come volunteer and things like that. But, we seemed to have a bunch of interest. Oh, by the way, this was a Community Volunteer Fair, so all the families of the embassy were coming by to see what projects they would like to help out on etc. There were quite a few that offered their houses while we were in town…for Peace Corps Volunteers, so I might take some of them up on that at some point.

Think they understand her?

Overall, it went well. We gave out a bunch of Spanish, and more English descriptions of our parish projects… we presented the parish Elderly Home, the parish School, the parish medical clinic, and the reconstruction effort as our main four. We made lots of good contacts, and I hope we gain from it in the future.

Us checking out of the embassy.

I am going to include pics of the projects later...the elderly home, school, clinic, and reconstruction.

The best quote of the day came from a lady on who approaching our table (not seeing me coming back from the side), and looked at my 3 boys standing there smiling said pointed at them confusedly…

“…and which one of you speaks English?”