Happy Easter

Today we awoke with the sun and the birds to watch the kids hunt for Easter eggs and baskets. Yep, the Easter Bunny made an appearance even in Costa Rica, but I think our house was the only one he visited.

Here in Costa Rica, we have been celebrating the whole week of Semana Santa, or Holy Week. It is a week break for all of the schools across the country, and Thursday and Friday are national holidays for everyone. And it has been a very interesting combination of activities and observances.

On the one hand, it's a lot like spring break. An enormous number of people made their way to the beach to camp and swim and grill out during the extended weekend. The revelry at our beach side hotel on Wednesday night went into the wee hours of the morning. We were quite thankful to be ending our beach time on Thursday and heading back to Turrialba while everyone else seemed to be going in the opposite direction.

When we returned to Turrialba, we got to experience a whole different side to Semana Santa. As a predominantly Catholic country, Costa Rica observes Good Friday with processions and dramatizations to capture the last day of Jesus' life. As with most of our experiences here, it would have been moving and interesting if it had been just Greg and me alone. But adding in the children created a whole new layer of perceptions and understanding. All three of the kids were fascinated by the various images and symbols used in the procession - things they are not used to seeing or hearing much about in our liberal, progressive protestant church. So many sights and sounds are hard to capture with the full force of the emotion they elicited: the men dressed up as the twelve disciples whose faces showed they'd really been crying; the women carrying the bloody crown of thorns, the nails, and the hammer on pillows; the Roman soldiers marching along to a hollow drum beat - accompanying Jesus' body (in a glass coffin) to the tomb; the crowd of observers, dressed in mourning clothes, who followed the procession in the exact same way they follow a real funeral procession to the cemetary. Maggie clearly understood when she asked me to pick her up, looked at the gathered crowd and said with the most earnest expression on her face, "This is NOT good for Jesus!"



We spent Saturday afternoon at our friend Gera's house, visiting with her family and enjoying a traditional Semana Santa dish of arroz con leche with conserve de chiverre (a clove-and-cinnamon- infused-marmalade-like-spread made from a vegetable that is similar to spaghetti squash). Our conversation lingered over the intensity of the processions. Gera's comment was that she cries every year, even though she knows how it ends.

And so today, Easter Sunday, I am missing my home church. After all the grief and mourning, I need a little celebration. But as Greg said in his last post about the turtles, we are all learning that a little sacrifice leads to some really cool gains - and experiencing Semana Santa here in Costa Rica has been well worth it.