Holy Holy Week

As a child growing up in a religiously ambidextrous family I made lots of arbitrary rules on how to attend Christian religious gatherings, especially Mass. Since arriving in Dominica my copious church experiences have made my rules come flooding back to me:

Erin’s Guide to attending Mass at a Roman Catholic Church circa 1993

Okay	Sacrilegious
Walking into a Catholic Church	Blessing one’s self with Holy Water
Saying the “Our Father”	Kneeling when entering pews
Saying prayers up until the moment when they mention “Jesus, Saviour, Christ, or Son of God”	Making the sign of the cross or the other sign the Catholics do a lot
Standing up	Kneeling while praying
Giving the Sign of Peace	Saying prayers that you know talk about Jesus
	Taking communion
	Saying prayers about the Virgin Mary
	Anything that involves lining up in the aisle and walking to the front of church

Over the past 18 years this system has worked impeccably; I’ve never been yelled at by anyone in church. I had to examine it this holy week though. I was told by some of the children that not blessing myself with holy water implies that I am a Soo Coo Yah, a terrifying witch/vampire that flies in the night and is disgusting looking and kills people. Soo Coo Yahs melt when holy water is thrown on them and not using holy water demonstrates the great possibility of being a Soo Coo Yah. As I am quite sure being labeled a Soo Coo Yah will greatly impair my ability to work with people I set out to discover whether blessing myself with holy water is as morally compromising as my 8-year-old self imagined. After conducting extensive research on the differences between Sacraments and Sacramentals I have created an updated Guide that will keep me from being labeled a Soo Coo Yah.

Erin’s Guide to attending Mass at a Dominican Roman Catholic Church (2011)

Okay	Sacrilegious
Everything else	Taking Communion

I had a field day this Holy Week! I blessed myself with holy water, kneeled, and tried out making the sign of the cross!

I put on my game face for Holy Week. Go big or go home, wi*? I pre-gamed Holy Week by helping out at the National Catholic Youth Rally on Friday and Saturday (4/15-16). I joined the women of the church in cutting hundreds of onions (I’m not quite allowed to do actual cooking here yet), cleaning the kitchen, and serving over 900 youth food at the Rally on Saturday. Most of you will be pleased to know that beer is served at the Catholic Youth Rally.

Palm Sunday officially began Holy Week! I walked with my knife, not an awesome cutlass, and cut my own palm to bring to the processional, which began at 7 am on the Savannah (the playing field about halfway up the hill) and continued down through the village praising Jesus loudly. The mass was a cool 3+ hours and included reading the entire Easter story.

Thursday night was my next Holy Week experience with a Holy Thursday mass at 7:30 pm. The priest called up 12 men from the community and washed their feet in front of the church. At the end of mass we enjoyed an hour in the rectory silently worshiping Jesus.

I woke up at 4 am on Friday to prepare for the Stations of the Cross. I packed a small bag with water, crackers, my EpiPen, a knife, sunscreen and bug spray, you never know what might happen during Stations of the Cross. We met at the Church minutes before 5 am and began our journey in the dark. We were to walk from the bottom of the hill up approximately 2,500 feet to the top of the community waking everyone on our path. The Stations were small shrines (with candles, pictures of Jesus, flowers) set up outside people’s homes. From Station to Station we sang hymns, said “Our Father’s”, “Glory be to the Father”, and “Hail Mary’s”. It was a little like the Catholic, non-costumed, non-alcoholic, version of Bay to Breakers. It took us a good 2.5 hours to make it up to the top and I now officially know how to pray the Rosary. At the final station Father delivered a short homily and we then went through a series of Litanies (i.e. really repetitive prayers) for about 45 minutes. One of my favorite parts came on our way home, my friend who is in her mid 50’s who I was attending with stopped at people’s houses (it was still just after 8 am) and hollered at them until they came outside and then berated them for not going through the Stations of the Cross. I always like sport smack talk but religious smack talk is WAY better.

After I took a brief rest I got up for Good Friday mass. Apparently I was supposed to have fasted all day and received a brief reprimanding when I arrived eating a big PB&J sandwich. I quickly redeemed myself by blessing myself with holy water and kneeling as I went into the pew. I did not have my handy manual for attending Good Friday mass with me and spent several minutes debating whether the Veneration of the Cross (kneeling down and kissing the cross) was acceptable. I decided against it.

My penultimate Holy Week experience was our 3.5 hour Easter Vigil on Saturday night. The majority of the church took several short “rests” during the mass, including the lady next to me who slept through the entirety of Jesus rising from the dead. I guess she’ll have to wait for next year to find out what happened.

My final Easter celebration was the Baptist Easter Rally at my host mom’s church. It was very much what you would assume a Baptist Easter Rally at a rural church in Dominica to look like.

Easter finally finished up with a huge party down by the Bay all night on Sunday and all day on Monday. (I bartended on Sunday night and look forward to telling you about my bartending tribulations.) Happy Easter!

* wi is yes in Kweyol and used like the Candians use eh.

Week 11

I try to go for a walk in my village everyday. They are rather slow walks generally, the elevation rises about 1,200 feet per mile, I get stopped about 15 times on a given day and I often get caught up trying to understand cricket at the nearby field. Each time I leave I prepare myself for the unknown, maybe I’ll spend the next three hours listening to country music and drinking rum and cokes with a retired couple, maybe someone will ask me if I’m with the CIA, perhaps I will get a two hour lecture by a Jew for Jesus about how the Christians ruined the bible, you never know.

Last week two older gentleman were sitting on their porch when I walked past. They called me over to chat and mentioned they had seen me before. I tried to introduce myself when the gentleman interrupted me to tell me I was looking “good and fat” and that the “Dominican food is doing a good job of fatting me up.” I laughed uncomfortably as they continued to talk amongst themselves about how fat I had gotten since arriving in Dominica. Now every time I pass they yell out to me “you gained weight Air-een!” (Luckily I have a scale in my apartment so their “compliments” shouldn’t give me body issues.)

Today on my walk I saw two boys from Grade 6 sitting next to an abandoned shack. I stopped to talk and one jumped up and ran around the back of the shed, I asked the other, who was still sitting where he had gone. He replied, “He went to make a poop in the bushes.” Normally I would have immediately laughed, assuming this was a joke, but on Sunday during our Palm Sunday processional to the church not one, not two but three boys stopped in the middle of the processional, walked to the side of the road and started peeing, as the rest of us slowly walked by, so I was doubting my ability to understand social norms. I walked away still unsure of how much I need to avoid bushes.

There’s only one thing that I can count on to happen every time I go out for a walk, being terrified that I will be beheaded. Through out the country and especially in farming communities (like Bawi) men and boys carry huge cutlasses with them (otherwise known as machetes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutlass). The cutlasses are completely unhindered by any form of casing or conventions that would force discretion upon them. Instead they are (fill in any imaginable emotion) swung about. Whenever I’m walking I pass at least one man sitting on the side of the road with a bottle of Red Cap Rum and a huge cutlass next to him. Usually I’ll pass another man waving his cutlass and casually cutting down anything along the roadside as he passes and my favorite, the small boys carrying the cutlasses to school. There are some rules, the cutlasses get left outside while the students are in class, and I’ve never seen a Grade K student with one but certainly no metal detectors.

I don’t have a cutlass yet but it is a top priority in things I need to purchase, especially after Sunday. I asked about where to meet for the Palm Sunday processional and what to bring (someone made the joke to me that every Sunday in the Caribbean is Palm Sunday which I tried at the Catholic Youth Rally and it failed big time). I was told to “walk with my knife.” So I left for mass on Sunday in my church clothes carrying a swiss army knife. I was laughed off the block trying to cut a palm with it.

Check in next week for Holy Week updates!

Week 10

Good afternoon!

I’m officially a Peace Corps volunteer!

After 3 days of Peace Corps events (Swear-in, a 50^th anniversary party and a “Unity Day”) which were all fun but rather troublesome I am in my village for good!

Sunday was exactly what I imagined life as a Peace Corps Volunteer to be like, save for the fact that I’m not living in a mud hut in Africa. I woke up at 5:30 am to prepare breakfast and shower before walking down the road to mass for 7 am. I finally know enough people at church that I can walk in alone and find someone to sit with. Mass lasts two hours and each week(I’ve attended 4 times) something new surprises me. Two weeks ago the “Our Father” was set to music reminiscent of a training montage in a movie about karate. This week I noticed that the offering includes toilet paper. I also think I missed out on my only opportunity to celebrate my birthday Dominican style: at the end of church they call everyone having a birthday to the front and sing a blessing to him/her. I was too nervous to go to the front (being that I’m not Catholic) and now am too embarrassed to tell anyone that it is my birthday.

After mass I hitched a ride home (it’s uphill and about 20 degrees hotter than when I walked down) with a woman who is friends with my host mom. I spent the rest of the morning washing my clothes, my washing machine is wonderful but still much more labor intensive than the ones we’re used to. I fill the washing basin with water, laundry detergent, and clothes and then it shakes everything up for 15 minutes. Then I manually drain the basin and refill it with clean water and repeat to rinse. Finally I ring the clothes out and hang them out to dry. My clothing line is on my porch and very visible so I have been given strict orders not to hang any under garments out. I have started washing my personal items in the shower with me like the Dominicans! (After noticing that my underwear were the only ones hanging out at my host mom’s house I adjusted my routine.)

I made myself lunch, scrambled eggs with fresh eggs from my counterpart’s (i.e. the person who requested a Peace Corps Volunteer) poultry farm and bread from my host mom’s bakery, and one of the eggs had 2 yolks! I assumed this was incredibly lucky. My counterpart came over while I was eating and asked, “Erin, aren’t you having any food?” When I responded that eggs and toast are in fact food he informed me that they are not- rice, chicken, salad, provisions (starches) and bread would be food. What I was eating was not.

Luckily I visited my neighbor to drop some plastic forks to donate for the Catholic World Youth Rally (which I am helping with, I’m loving the Catholics here) and she gave me “food.” It’s called banana pie, which is green bananas (which are provisions) mashed up with butter, milk and cod fish and covered with a delicious cheese sauce and baked. It was a win. We limed (hung out) on her porch for a while with her sister from St. Thomas and they told me about why Salisbury is better than any other village on the island.

Then I got fresh and went to a meeting about the Salisbury Reunion beauty pageant. Everyone else arrived in true Dominican style between 35 and 90 minutes late for the meeting. Waiting gave me time to be questioned by many passerbys “why they are never seeing me.” One woman told me she thought I had gone back to America after not seeing me on Thursday or Friday. This, confusingly, is a sign of being integrated, that people notice your absence and assumed you have left forever.

When I came home from the meeting my landlady, Ma Clem, gave me a beautiful bucket of papaya, mangoes, peppers, grapefruit and fresh corn from her family’s farm. I boiled some corn on the cob for dinner (which was again critiqued as not food) and settled into my porch to watch the rainfall and drink my fresh squeezed grapefruit juice.

Pretty idyllic, huh?

I made a home video of my home but I can't figure out how to use technologies to make it load. Hopefully I will by next time!

This is my training class at swear-in with the Eastern Caribbean Director and the Dominica Director.

Week 9

Good night!

Sorry I’m running a little late with this entry; things are heating up in the Caribbean!

I swear-in this week (i.e. I become an official Peace Corps Volunteer) and last weekend I moved into my own apartment. I’m just up the road from my home stay in a great little apartment that I will share pictures of next week. Maybe even a video home tour!

To swear-in I had to implement a Service Learning project (basically a project where young people do community service). After being at my primary school for a couple weeks I decided to focus my project on working with the students who are recent Haitian immigrants. My community has a large population of Haitian immigrants and they face enormous challenges. On top of the many social and economic challenges of immigrating to Dominica (they are the victims are a lot of xenophobia), many do not speak any English. The children are required to attend school but Dominica has social promotion (you are placed in whatever grade your age would be assigned to) and there are no English Language Learning services so often the children cannot understand anything in the classroom. They sit for 6 hours a day at a desk with no way to learn.

My project is a tutoring program between 5^th grade students who speak some Kweyol (which the Haitian students speak) and younger children who do not speak English. During lunch (there are not after school programs in my community) we met for the launch of the program, which was attended by the director of Peace Corps for Dominica (who is wonderful). I had the 5^th graders lead a discussion about compassion and being a good tutor before the project began. About halfway through the discussion the director was not paying attention and one of the 5^th graders called on him to summarize the discussion thus far. The students at my school are incredible.

After swear-in volunteers are supposed to spend two days a week at his/her school assignment (for the first 3 months) and the rest of the week with the assigned organization. The group I am working with is a community group, Salisbury Enhancement Committee (SEC) (www.bawilinkup.com), which plans events and programs in the community because we do not have a village council (which is the local government in other communities). The people in the Committee are wonderful, however there is no office and no full time staff. Therefore I am responsible for occupying myself. So beginning on Monday (my birthday) I will be on my own! I’m looking forward to working in the pre-school, the health center and at the primary school. SEC is also organizing a large reunion (think high school reunion but 16 days and for a village) this summer, which should keep me quite busy.

Check out my home tour and photos of swear-in next week!

Good night!

View from my front porch at sunset. That is the Caribbean. Glass courtesy of Vizzi's, Buffalo, NY.