Semana Santa

Semana Santa

Semana Santa, Holy Week, is a combination of piety and play.  It also provides a week vacation from school and the opportunity for Peace Corps volunteers to travel.  I spent 3 days in Leon staying with my friend Lisa and she came back to my site in the North for three days to escape the heat of Leon and to get a taste of the simple life.  So it turned out to be an interesting week of contrasts.

First a word about the religious celebration of Semana Santa.  Both in Leon and up here in the North there’s a procession every time you turn around.  In Leon, on Palm Sunday, I stopped on the steps of the cathedral just as the folks were gathered with their palms. The procession featured a very conquistador looking plaster Jesus dressed in red trimmed with gold, hair curled under a red and gold hat, riding a real burro into the cathedral. Later in the day we came upon alfombres in the streets near the cathedral.  Alfombres are large squares on the pavement, religious pictures, made of colored sawdust around the theme of the passion of Christ, sort of like Hopi sand paintings but not as fine due to the coarser medium.  In my town there were processions every night, Wednesday through Sunday, mostly at night but on Easter morning at 5 a.m., too. So Semana Santa is for sure a religious holiday. 

But it is also a week of parties, of drinking, of getting wet at the beach or in a pool or however. (My Spanish professor said he planned to celebrate by letting his hose run over his head, his joke on the Nica insistence on water in this holy, hot time of year.)  Anyone who can afford it travels, if not to the beach then to visit family.  The busses are packed and many don’t run at all on Thursday and Friday.  On Thursday Lisa and I traveled to the nearest big town, Somoto, on our way to the Canyon, but the town was quiet, the market and my favorite eateries closed, and we worried that having found a taxi to take us to the Canyon, we wouldn’t be able to find one back.  That trip reminded me how I’ve learned to wait.  I can wait for an for an hour for a bus without stressing.  I can wait for 2 ½ hours to talk to a group of teachers.  I can return to an office two, three, four times until I can talk to the person I need to see. In this regard I’m thoroughly Nica-fied.  But Lisa from the big city didn’t suffer the waits gladly. On the other hand, her superior Spanish and openness to talk to anyone paid off for us over and over.

I have two favorite Semana Santa memories.  One is floating in a life jacket down the mangrove estuaries at the beach a half hour from Leon.  On the 2 hour float trip we were like a pair of crocodiles, so silent in the water, coming abreast of egrets and other water birds, no other person in sight for the whole float trip except once when a canoe passed us carrying some local people.

 The other memory is sitting in the kitchen of my house on the night we arrived back in my town.  There had been a huge storm, the first rain in 2 months, and not only were the lights out, but there was no water. We had made a trip by flashlight to a pulperia to buy milk and I had real wheat bread and peanut butter from Leon. So we had peanut butter and honey sandwiches with milk for dinner, a rare and wonderful treat, there in the kitchen by the light of my 71 year old host mom’s flashlight.  She was so comfortable with us and with herself that she proceeded to give herself a pedicure while Lisa and I ate. The light from her flashlight lit her face so that she looked like a woman painted by Vermeer, bent over her feet while outside the music of a procession in the next street reached the house, a kind of tuba, horn music, strangely cheerful given the sorrowful reason for the religious procession. 

I watched a bunch of processions over Semana Santa, and finally decided to put my religious scruples aside and joined one in my town. When you are walking you are aware of the quiet, except for a drum beating a slow tattoo, the sound of people’s feet shuffling.  It was very peaceful, very communal, and I was glad I did it.