When They Say Christmas is Magical

Just into the second week after Easter our lives are settling back into their routines.  Holy Week is the biggest celebration of the entire year in Nicaragua.  How people celebrate differs, for some it’s a week at the beach and for others it’s the high holiday of the church year, but one way or the other, half the country is on vacation since the Friday before.  There are special rituals, parades, fireworks, full churches, and huge parties all week.  The only thing I could compare it to in the US would be the Christmas season.  And in that respect, it has been a gift to experience in a new place that feeling people are trying to get at when they say Christmas is magical.   

Our family has started to build its own set of rituals, one of which is going to visit the sawdust carpets on Good Friday.  Each year in the Sutiava neighborhood on the night of Good Friday there is a big procession.  In the afternoon artists from the neighborhood start creating murals of colored sawdust in the procession route.  They usually depict biblical scenes or some famous site in León.  Crowds start showing up mid-afternoon to come and see the artists working and by the evening the streets are packed in anticipation of the procession, which will pass through the carpets.  The centerpiece of the procession is a funeral bed carrying Jesus, with his weeping mother following behind.  The atmosphere is not quite like anything I’ve experienced before.  The crowds make the whole event feel quite festive, but the symbolism of the carefully created carpets, like the palms, laid down to honor the sacrificed Christ is solemn, sad and beautiful. 

If you've never experienced Holy Week in Latin America, we'd love to share it with you.  It's a time made for visiting with family and friend, and our door's open. 

Action against Arsenic

In January, Nuevas Esperanzas started a new project to provide families from five rural communities with filters to remove the arsenic from their drinking water.  (The arsenic is naturally occurring.  See my reply to Ben Sadler's comment below for an explanation.)  Last year Nuevas Esperanzas coordinated a health study which found that these families were ingesting significant amounts of this poison in their drinking water.

People drinking water contaminated with arsenic will not usually get sick immediately.  However, ingesting high levels arsenic can significantly increase the long-term risks of serious illnesses.  People regularly drinking water with more that 50 ppb (parts per billion) of arsenic may be at one hundred times greater risk of cancer later in life, for example. 

With the filter project the hope is to accomplish two things.  First, we want help some of the most affected families from the study clean up their water right away.  Second, we want to test to see if these filters could be applied more widely.  Unfortunately in appears that arsenic contamination could potential problem not only for these communities but also for communities throughout the entire region.

Nuevas Esperanzas finished building the filters last month and finished them to the families just last week.  The slideshow shows the training session that was provided before setting up the filters in each home, to explain where the arsenic was coming from, how the filters are built, and how they clean the water. 

If you’re interested in learning more about this there are articles on the NE website about how the filters are built and how they work, as well as about the clinics where the data was collected for the health study.