La Pascua - Easter

Semana Santa - Easter Weekend

When I was younger, Easter was all about Easter baskets, putting on my Easter dress, going to church, hunting for Easter eggs, and then some sort of meal with the family. 

Then we all grew up and we became the people that hid the Easter eggs at church, stopped wearing special Easter clothes, and really stopped making a big deal out of Easter..at least, to me it didn't seem like a big deal. An odd turn of events as you would think Easter would become more important as you could better understand the crucifixion and resurrection and the significance of it all. 

At any rate, Easter this year did seem a bit more special. Being away from the family is not a desired occurrence, but it is fun to see how other people do things. So, here is what we did for Easter in Peru.. 

The whole week leading up to Easter, Holy Week/Semana Santa, seems to be important. On Monday, I received a flier to attend a Jehova's Witness event and the Catholic churches seemed pretty busy. Also, I am told that they only sell fish at the market (for some reason, we never made it there to know for sure). Some one will have to inform me of the significance of eating fish. This was really good for Consuelo. She had family members helping her all week with selling fish. We even got to try chupe de camarones, which is a creamy shrimp soup that the Lima area is known for, with reason too; it's delicious. Thursday and Friday are federal holidays. 

Friday is where our church activities begin, as usual. Instead of having class, we watched a movie called "El Perdon" (I'm not sure what the movie is called in English, but that translates to "Forgiveness"). We popped popcorn and had soda for our movie treats. As expected, pretty much all little kids came. As our church leaders still have not figured out that we have mostly kids at Monte Sion activities, we did not have a kid-oriented movie. Even still, almost all of them stayed for the whole movie, only a few fell asleep, and the most amazing part was they were not very distruptive. After the movie, Wilfredo helped recap what happened, so that they could understand. Overall, it went well. 

Saturday we had a special church service focused on the crucifixion. For some reason, Jhonny decided we didn't need to have kids class, but we couldn't just leave the kids out. We had been talking about how we decorate and hunt for Easter eggs in the States, so Rocio and Graciela decided that is what we should do. They boiled up some eggs and then when we got to church, the kids colored the eggs. Unfortunately, we don't have any place to hide eggs that dogs wouldn't snatch them up first, so just coloring them was the way to go. Some kids colored and then immediately ate their egg. Others were saving them for later. One kid, Elias, said he was going to save his hard-boiled egg forever because his egg represented Jesus and he can't eat Jesus. I tried to convince him that it was just symbolic and better that he eat the egg before it goes bad...I'm not sure what he decided to do. Haha. 

Elias with his "Jesus"egg.

We had a song and video intensive service. Apparently they have a whole section of the hymnal that has songs for Easter. I didn't recognize a single song we sang. A few people from the family recently went and saw the movie "Son of God" in theaters, so first thing Saturday morning, Jhonny headed out to go find the movie. Gotta love the pirated movie scene here in Peru. Somehow he found it and it was DVD quality, not taped in a movie theater quality. Impressive. For church then, we watched the sentencing up to Jesus on the cross scenes. Thankfully, it is a lot less graphic than "Passion of the Christ," though still quite difficult to watch. After watching the movie, we watched a music video that was mostly scenes from another movie showing the crucifixion. There was a lot of bloody Jesus. I think it is important to know the crucifixion part of the story, but it was a lot for me. I'm used to my home congregation where we talk about the crucifixion and focus on the resurrection, not showing clip after clip of Jesus being whipped and abused. The other day on TV, we were watching a report on a reenactment done in Ayacucho of the crucifixion - like how the South reenacts Civil War battles, they were reeanacting the end of Jesus' life. Finally, Jhonny shared a little bit about the crucifixion and talked mainly about the sign above Jesus on the cross - "Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews." 

It was a good service and we had a good crowd of people come. I like special events because people come out from hiding. We get to meet new people. The different variety of people changes the dynamic of interactions. It's good stuff to see new people or see people you haven't seen in a long time. 

To conclude Semana Santa, we fasted. During our pre-church classes, we had been studying the Lenten activities as listed on the cofchrist.org website. The first Sunday's lesson was on fasting (in spanish = ayuno). As it turned out, not many people here have tried fasting, so Jhonny thought we should give it a shot. Our fast lasted from after lunch on Saturday to lunch on Sunday. They seemed quite scared of not eating for a day, which I thought was a bit dramatic and hilarious. We ate a massive lunch on Saturday. Then, we were busy all that evening in Monte Sion, so we don't normally eat anything until almost midnight those nights anyway. Then, Sunday morning, we got up and went over to Prudencio's to help make lunch. Breakfast is my favorite meal, and I even dreamt that I messed up fasting by eating breakfast, but I didn't. Once lunchtime rolled around, people started pulling snacks out of their pockets. They were prepared to break their fast, couldn't even wait til lunch was served. Lunch, btw, was fantastic. We had grilled beef and chicken, potatoes, corn, a delicious sauce on top, maracuya juice, and brownies. It was nice to have the whole family together. 

The church service was then geared towards the resurrection and Jesus recognizing Mary Magdalene when he reappeared. 

After the service, they made the announcement about Betzabe being pregnant. All of the moms, dads, aunts, and uncles, shared about their joy for her and some of their words of wisdom. Consuelo is very excited to be a grandma. Going to be a big year for her family with her son enegaged to be married and her daughter about to have a baby! 

And so concludes Semana Santa and Easter in Peru. 

~nos vemos~