January 3, 2012
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Rather than travel elsewhere within the country for Christmas, we decided to stay with our host family and experience a Campo Christmas. This was good in that we got to spend time with much of the extended family and meet a lot of people. It was, however, challenging in that we had to spend time with much of the extended family and meet a lot of people.
Many people come to visit the families in our campo for Christmas and New Year’s. This is because many of the people who grow up here eventually leave to attend school or find work. Frequently they get married to someone outside of the campo and start a family in the city. It would seem that all of them return for Christmas, and I would venture to say that the population of the campo doubles. We had 15 people living in our house for the Christmas holidays, which extend to about a week and a half or two weeks here. As I mentioned previously, it was very nice to meet all of the relatives and spend time with our host family. However, that many people living in one house for such a long time can make you go crazy.
Additionally, it turned out that our house was a top visiting spot for everyone in the campo. I would say that there were two main reasons for this. One, we have two teenage girls in the house who are a magnet to young bachelors from all over the region. Two, our family has two Americans staying with them that apparently are remarkably entertaining. I’m not sure why, but it is a rare occasion when visitors from outside the campo want to talk to us. They would much rather stand right in front of us and talk about us with other people. This can be frustrating because they do this even after they find out that we speak decent(ish) Spanish. I think this is partly because they just don’t know what to make of two Americans living and working in the campo. Anyway, the large groups of gawkers that we encountered did little to make us feel comfortable.
Christmas Day did not feel very much like Christmas, but it was still a good enough day. There were no decorations, presents, nor carols, but we did have a nice meal with pork, rice, and beans. We were a bit spoiled with meat during Christmas as it is generally a once-per-week occasion. On Christmas day, we went to a Palos party that was pretty neat. Palos are sort of like large African drums and people dance to the playing and singing of some of the community men. The dance itself is not very complex and I would describe it as fancy shuffling. Everybody wanted to see us shuffle, though, as we were constantly encouraged to dance more. I believe that while this may be for the pleasant intention of them wanting to us to share in their culture, it’s more likely that they find our dancing to be extraordinarily entertaining. We had some very tasty refreshments at the party as well, including an orange-flavored juice and the stale hamburger bread biscuits. We would regret the juice around midnight as it turned out to have been made from unpurified water and we spent the rest of the night clearing our systems. Yay!
We did not stay up for New Years. We did go to a New Year’s party at the brand-new colmado recently opened by our project partner. We did not stay long though as people were mostly sitting around and talking amongst each other. And, if you recall that people in groups prefer to talk about us rather that to us, that wasn’t very exciting. We went home and watched the Lord of the Rings on our laptop with Spanish subtitles. I probably didn’t learn much Spanish, at least not useful Spanish. You rarely get the opportunity to say things like ''Find the halflings!''
Right now we are getting ready for our courses and writing up our diagnostic report. It’s a bit quiet but we are pressing forward. We are also excited that it looks like the foundation will be poured soon for our house! As much as we love our host family, it will be good to have some space and privacy* to ourselves. Here’s to the start of a new and exciting year!
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