Today it was all about the eggs. I’d forgotten that Cali needed eggs for Carnival, which is on Tuesday. The custom here is to colourfully paint eggs, empty them and replace with confetti, then seal the opening with a bit of tissue paper. On Carnival you smash these on your friend’s head for good luck.
Of course the teenagers have a variation of this. They first use real eggs on each other, then on top of that they smash eggs filled with flour on top. Makes for a wonderful mess. Kier has such fond memories of the last carnival we spent here. The kids were running all around the entire town ambushing each other. But the crowd she hangs with now are a bit older, I’m not sure there is any interest in doing this.
Monday morning arrived and Cali didn’t have three colored eggs and 8 empty eggs to paint, to take to school. She’d told me on Friday to get them and I put her off, saying we had all weekend. It’s quite an adjustment not having a car to quick-fix my parental errors. So at 7:45 I paid for my oversight by having to ride into town on my bike in search of eggs — three colored and 8 white (not brown). The one store that sells white eggs opens at 8am. Now I needed to find some colored eggs to buy. The little shops have these all over the place, but only a few places are open as early at 8. A reasonable generalization is that Guatemaltecos are not early risers. After more exercise than I needed at this hour, I’m lucky enough to find a place. I ride home to empty the eggs, then rode them up to Cali at her school. She was standing in the hallway with the three other girls from her class. They were giggling and laughing. Never get tired of seeing that.
After the successful egg delivery, I took a ride up to the first bridge that comes into Pana, toward the mountains. I thought it wouldn’t be too far, but that wasn’t the case. By the time I got to my Spanish class at 9, I was tired.
In the evening, after school the older girls did their homework, we all stayed in.
There is a choir that meets tonight that I will attend next week. I’m excited to join. Last time I was here I was also in a choir, but I hadn’t been able to track one down until now. It’s a lot of asking different people if there is a group that sings in town. Eventually you stumble across someone with the information you need. This time it happened to be Kier’s guitar teacher to directs it. Excited.
There was a house exorcism going on across the little path from us. This is the biggest one I’ve seen, not a small quickie. A pretty penny was paid for that one, quite a few participants and for a good length of time. I’m thinking this is a booming business, because one doesn’t ever have to run out of evil spirits. The women were inside and one of the grandma’s was out on our path watching all the children. These must be the kids of the chanting women. So while the women were chanting and wailing, the kids were doing the same thing on our path. Does this mean the barbed wire won’t be as eager to snag our arms or that fewer dogs will leave presents on our path that we step on when we walk home at night? We’ll have to wait and see if they got it right.