This is a late but requested update of our Christmas actvities. Joe and I (with the welcomed companionship of Joe's cousin, Merideth) spent a Christmas on the road, travelling from our northern tropics to the dry mountains of southern Honduras. Our destination was to revisit the small village of Caragual (home of Doña Nativa and her daughter, Carla). Our travels spanned the 20th to the 29th of December and included rides by taxi, in the back of a pick-up truck, in the cab of a cantaloupe-laden semi (driven by an 18-year-old with 4 years of experience driving rigs), and a total of 9 different buses, ranging from luxury line to a makeshift “bus” constructed by building high wooden sides around the bed of a pickup truck and cramming the structure full of people (at least 15) and 8 bags of cement, boxes of chips, and a wide array of heavily laden shopping bags.
We renewed contact with many friends in the South. We were dismayed by Doña Nativa´s rapid decline in health. The family celebrated Christmas with laughter and tears at the same time. Doña Nativa´s advanced case of tuberculosis left her a skeleton of the person she was, making her hardly able to eat, struggling with each breath, and crying out in pain constantly. I expect that by now she has gone to be with the Lord. She and her 13-year-old daughter, Carla, had relocated to live with other family members and seemed well cared for at the time of our visit. We spent Christmas with them and their colorful family, wrapping mountains of tamales in banana leaves (traditional Christmas fare), watching a Barbie movie and Home Alone on their tiny, battery run black-and-white TV, and listening to the loud bangs of fireworks from the nearby city at midnight of the 24th-25th. It was a sharp study in contrasts—the celebration of a birth bringing hope, and the despair of one near death.
Our time in the village left me with several powerful memories:
* The village Christmas pageant. It was held each day in the late afternoon at different houses in the village in the days leading up to Christmas. There was a brief lesson and reading about Christmas, then the scene of Mary and Joseph knocking on the inn door was acted out by the village children. “Maria” was a village girl dressed in a beautiful white dress with a veil over her head. Joseph, a boy from the village, was dressed as a traditional campesino farmer, with a derby hat, a long tunic with a traveling belt, and a foil-covered walking stick and gourd of water for the journey. They stood with half the audience outside the door in the honey-glow of the setting sun, knocked and sang their need for a place to sleep. The group inside the house sang their reply. I found their faces in the light and the memorized simplicity of their play striking.
* Nativity scenes: I saw several while in the village, one at the church and one in a nearby home, and they were treasured by their owners. The scenes were set up within a circle of sand on a table. A bizarre mismatched menagerie of plastic figurines gathered around a tiny plastic baby Jesus. Donald Duck, a plastic cow, a large green snail, and Happy Meal characters as wise men all reverently faced the Christ-child.
* The “House of Prayer:” I visited the village church on Christmas Eve and found five women scrubbing and whitewashing the walls. There were simple, sparse decorations I would normally label "gaudy" at the front (a red and green plastic table cloth pinned to the front wall, a startling mish mash of artificial flowers on the front table, and the aforementioned nativity scene). Everyone exclaimed over the beauty of the decorations.
I missed the joys of family and friends, missed the classy evergreen-and-white-lights decorations, and missed the special Christmas hymns in English. But at the same time, Christmas this year was stripped of glitz and laid bare—as a desperate and fervent longing for things to be made right, for death to be challenged, and for hope be made known to the poor.