Feliz Navidad everyone! The adorable yet frightened looking children above are Rosita and Osman and they are dressed as Mary and Joseph. Every night this past week we've been doing Posadas, which is a pre-Christmas tradition down here which involves dressing two kids up as Mary and Joseph and going around to houses singing asking for “posada” which is like rest or a place to stay. We get sung rejections at the first two houses but then the third houses lets us in where we sing more songs and talk and eat snacks. Its really fun and usually ends in someone falling asleep on me (second picture above).
My fellow teachers and I have also been given charge of directing a rendition of the Nativity performed by our little kids. I think Joseph quit on Thursday and the Angel Gabriel insists on wearing a bunny mask and carrying a sword. I don’t even want to see what happens when we add in the sheep and angels who are all under 6. So we’ll see how that goes when we perform it in 3 days...
Three of the other girl volunteers in my house have lice right now but so far I have gotten by uninfested. One of our nuns just found out today she has the strongest strain of malaria, but don’t worry about me I've been taking my meds. This morning Dan (red head above) went to light our wood stove when he saw something dark in the back which turned out to be a chicken. He tried banging on the top and poking it with sticks but it just kept squawking and wouldn’t move. Finally, to use Dan’s words, the chicken “shit out an egg” and “lunged” at his face, but both chicken and human were unharmed. I think we’ll probably eat the egg.
Well that’s about all the news from down here in rural Honduras! All our big Christmas celebrations will be on 24th because that’s what they do here, and we’ll enjoy the traditional meal of tamales and chicken salad sandwiches. Mmm!
Okay so I wrote that before Christmas but then didn’t get to put it up due to horrible internet connections. So now it is the 27th, I hope everyone had a great Christmas and wasn’t too hot. Oh wait that was probably only me. I spent all day on the 24th making tamales, which are kind of like the Honduras equivalent of turkey after Thanksgiving, I think we've eaten them for pretty much every meal since then. What they are are ground up corn which is then boiled with a lot of lard in water for a long time until it becomes this kind of mush type stuff, then you scoop a bit into a cooked banana leaf with some rice, maybe a slice of potato and carrot, some part of a chicken quite possibly the foot, and some rice, then you wrap it up in the banana leaf and boil it for a couple hours until it’s about the consistency of congealed animal fat. Get yourself a chicken sandwich and a big glass of coke and you’re good to go! Our Nativity play was a very loose translation…Gabriel just sat down in the middle of the stage and watched when mary and Joseph were rejected from the inn, and our little innkeeper kind of forgot his lines and just ended up yelling out “¡No hay espacio en mi casa! ¡Establo!” (“There is no room in my house! Stable!”). But they were all really cute so it didn’t really matter. Well that’s about all that’s been going on down here! Merry Christmas! I miss you all!!