La Pascua!

So Holy Week or Semana Santa is a big deal here in the DR. Classes are cancelled for the week and many religious activities take place (i.e. misa). So our week was jam-packed with all of that along with various outreach trips we made to the nearby bateys (see foot-washing below). This was technically my weekend off, so Av and I got off-site a bit. We spent Friday afternoon and Saturday morning hanging out at the nearby Batey Monte Cristi with our Peace Corps pal Phoebe. Not only did we get to play volleyball and do puzzles with a new batch of kids, we got in a few seriously Dominican/Haitian experiences...

1) Habichuelas con dulce aka sweet beans. So take your normal brown beans, blend them up, add some sugar and perhaps raisins, and bam, you have your typical Dominican Easter dessert. Phoebe (and her hubby Daniel) received no less than 7 bowls of this from their neighbors the two days we were there.

2) Pan mamba. DELISH. We popped on over to Phoebe’s friends' house and each tried a slice of her homemade bread slathered in homemade peanut butter (mamba in Creole). A Haitian delicacy...and only 15 pesos each (30 cents)!

3) Gaga. Seriously one of my top 3 experiences here yet. Both Friday night and Saturday morning we walked along the dirt streets along with the festive gaga-goers. Gaga, in a nutshell, is a typical Easter street procession for Haitians who practice voodoo. It involves many bright silk costumes, a street-sweeper who leads the group by sweeping away the bad spirits, people dancing over fire on the street, other people swinging machetes around, and yet others playing all sorts of awesome instruments such as the drums, tamborine, and these long plastic horns. And then of course, there’s chanting/singing in Creole to accompany all of this as well as hip-moving that makes Shakira look like a novice. Even had I taken a picture, it wouldn’t have come close to showing the authentic-ness of this experience. Here’s some more info brought to you courtesy of Wikipedia about gaga :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rara

Anywho, Easter Day rolls around on Sunday. It was a pretty relaxed day. Avriel and I went to the beach, which was PACKED FULL of people. We also had our paths crossed by meandering cows numerous times, saw more police than ever before in the country, rode on various guaguas and motos, and saw even more gaga processions, this time in San Pedro. We closed up the evening by hanging out and joking around with the other volunteers at the house and getting some shut-eye.