La Semana Santa

This week was “la Semana Santa” which means, as you all know, Holy Week.  Here, they celebrate all week, from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday.  That means, no work, no school, no nothing.  It was rather boring for me, because I don’t have a bunch of friends here, but for everyone else it was a big party.  People swam in the river and drink and a bunch of people not from here come up here to swim in the river too.  With all these visitors I’ve realized how much more integrated into my community I am.  I don’t get so many cat-calls and people questioning who I am anymore, but since people have arrived for the week, I’ve been getting a lot of it.  It’s very annoying, but good to know that I am fitting into my community well enough that that stuff is going away some.

On Friday, my host mom called me and said, “I’m calling to tell you not to cook today, you’re going to come eat here.”  OK.  Eating there was nothing special, but then they made habichuelas con dulce.  Literally, sweet beans.  I tried them once, they were gross.  But, my host mom is a good cook and the ones she made weren’t that bad.  It’s liquefied red beans stewed in sugar, milk, and spices.  It’s definitely not for everyone.  She also made these fried yam balls which were then soaked in this juice of spices, and there were FANTASTIC, I’m definitely getting the recipe. 

I tried getting my “video diary” up on the internet, but the internet is too slow here to make it work before my blog times out.  I will do another one and post it for next week as I will be in the capital for a couple days and can use faster internet.  I hopefully will be getting a yoga mat (to work on my flab), a cooking dutch oven, and a bunch of other little things to make life better.  I am also hoping some packages that you guys have sent me are on their way and will be there when I get there!

I also realized I will have to do a lot of campaigning for this doctor and clinic and hospital to get people to use it.  A couple nights ago there was a car accident.  This is quite rare here.  The people found transportation and went to San Cristobal to the hospital because they knew the clinic here couldn’t do much for them.  But, here’s the rub, San Cristobal is an hour drive.  They waited an hour to be seen by any doctor just because this doctor couldn’t “do much.”  It took a lot to convince them that while he could not have “done much” he could have stopped the bleeding with clean bandages instead of shirts and checked for any signs of things that needed to be done immediately to prevent a lot of serious problems or death.  They really didn’t understand that taking them to this doctor for a 5 or 10 minute assessment could save the people’s life and wouldn’t exactly tack on too much to the hour drive they were going to make.  If it were that severe, I’m sure the doctor would have even gone with them to try and stabilize the patients in the car.  Getting people to see things that way will be a challenge.