Well Merry Christmas everyone! The Christmas celebration I had here was certainly different from what most of you might have done for the holiday, but it was fun and interesting nonetheless. Here in the DR people celebrate Christmas Eve moreso than Christmas day. The day was spent preparing food and cleaning the house for the dinner that would take place that night. At five I went to the Catholic mass (surprisingly, none of the other churches were having events on Christmas Eve). There weren't a whole lot of people who attended—many people were busy catching up with family members who had come back to the community to visit for the holidays, but the mass was nice nonetheless; we prayed, sang, and sang some more.
Upon returning I stopped by the "community oven" which is located in a community leader's backyard and was the spot where everyone was baking their chickens (most people here do not have ovens, so they paid a small fee to pay for gas to use the community oven on Christmas). We picked up our chicken and went back home. The electricity hadn't come on yet so we decided to wait until it came on to eat, however by 730 it still hadn't come on so we decided to eat anyways. We had baked chicken, bread, a salad of beets, eggs, potatoes and carrots, and spaghetti. That night was pretty mellow; once the electricity came back on my host family put on a movie and I went to visit the Canadian nuns and a few family members who were visiting them. We ended up going back into the church to look at the small Christmas tree that was lit up and we sang a few Christmas Carols (in French and Spanish) to make it feel a little more like Christmas.
Christmas day was a day of rest—all night people had been playing loud music and partying, and at 430 am the Catholic church had a service that mainly consisted of singing. Since I couldn't sleep with all the music anyway, a few of my host family members and I went up there to sing. We sang, drank ginger tea and had some Christmas candies. I returned home to sleep some more and spend the day visiting with people. The rest of the day was pretty mellow—Christmas day isn't really a day when people get presents (the kids got presents for the “Dia del nino”--day of the child, that were donated by a Canadian organization) but they do get new clothes—all the children that are enrolled in what I call the “church school” and have foreign sponsors get a check to go to a certain store and buy a new set of clothes. In the afternoon everyone dressed up in their new clothes and paraded around, and when the kids got tired and went back home, the adults went out to celebrate in the discos.
Christmas night I went and sat with some of the “jovenes” (teens) that were not out in their new clothes because many of them could not afford them, or they did not want to go to the bars with the other jovenes. Instead, they were sitting in a circle with a drum, an empty paint can and a couple other makeshift instruments and they were singing, rapping and joking around. They sang their Evangelical songs, but also made up raps about the “Americana”(that would be me), and invited me to sing (I sang “Jingle Bells” for them). At times half the circle was laughing hysterically because of some rap one of the kids was singing or the way they were dancing. That might have been the best part of my day; seeing that these kids, though they have very little, can be incredibly creative and enjoy themselves as much, if not more, than anyone else.
No comments:
Post a Comment