Sarah Evangelist(a) en Mérida: Fútbol, Día de los Muertos, and Celestún

This past week has been a whirlwind - I have a feeling that the closer I get to the end of the semester, the faster time will go. At the end of October we went to a soccer (fútbol) game, which was fun but ended in a disappointing tie, Mérida 0, Veracruz 0. The weekend of October 31-November 2 was Hanal pixan/ Day of the Dead here in Mexico, which meant that there were Day of the Dead altars set up in the city center and that we ate a lot of pib (a dish cooked in banana leaves almost like a casserole with chicken, beans, and tortillas) and pan de muerto (bread of the dead). The protestant Christians here do not officially celebrate el Día de los Muertos, but we still ate pib and pan de muerto.

The end of this past week has been very rainy in Yucatán, perhaps because of tropcal storm or hurricane Ida. I don't mind a little bit of rain...but unfortunately many of Mérida's streets flood with murky water if the rain lasts all day.

This past Friday Janelle and I left to spend the weekend in Celestún, a port town on the western coast of Yucatán. Everyone in our group spent a weekend in a small town (un pueblo) in Yucatan or Campeche (the state to the south of Yucatan) except for Janelle and I the weekend that we stayed in Mérida for the anniversary of El Divino Salvador, so we went to Celestún this weekend instead. We stayed with one family and ate with a different family for every meal while we were there. Everyone was very friendly and welcoming, and it was kind of nice to take a break from Mérida and relax in a much smaller town. On Saturday the rest of our group came to Celestún, and we all went to see wildlife (especially flamingos) in the river and coastline of Celestún. We saw flamingos, herons, sandpipers, and osprey, and we also went through a mangrove forest (which was inhabited by lots of hungry mosquitos). After the wildlife tour we spent a bit of time at the beach and eating at La Palapa, a restaurant that serves mostly seafood. Maria orded "pescado frito" (fried fish) and was dismayed to find that the WHOLE fish (including the fins and head) was fried and served on the plate.

After the rest of our group left to return to Mérida (most of our group went to stay in small towns or "pueblos" the weekend that Janelle and I stayed in Mérida for our church's anniversary celebration), Janelle and I went back to the house where we were staying for a bit before having dinner with another family. On Sunday we had breakfast with yet another family before going to church. I had a bit of trouble following the sermon after awhile partly because the sermon was long and partly because there were a fair number of distractions happening during the sermon, but it was still an enjoyable service. After the service most of the church members (a lot of them are related) gathered to eat lunch together. Janelle and I were sad to leave on Sunday afternoon - we didn't stay in Celestún for very long, but the people were very kind and it was a fun weekend overall, despite the copious amounts of rain we received each night and the number of mosquitos that tried to eat us alive.

The church member who was "in charge" of us during our weekend was the church's young pastor, Gilberto, who recently graduated from Seminario San Pablo in Mérida. "Gil" (pronounced almost like "Heel") was very kind and insisted that Janelle and I would not spend any money during our time with the church, even though we were sent with money to cover at least the cost of our food during our stay with church members. At the end of the weekend we ended up giving him the money as an offering, but not reimbursement for the hospitality we had received. Gil told us that a church in the United States gave him a scholarship that covered his years of study at the seminary in Mérida and that he was from Chiapas, a state to the south of the Yucatán Peninsula. He also told us that he was far from fluent in Spanish when he came to the seminary a few years ago, as his first language is a dialect of maya that is spoken in Chiapas. Gil was another reminder of the diversity in Mexico that is hidden from outsiders like me - before I came to Mexico, I figured that most Mexicans were about the same culturally and ethnically and that all of them spoke Spanish. While all of Mexico was once ruled by Spain, the cultures and languages of the different people groups who inhabited Mexico before the arrival of the Spanish continue to influence their respective regions of the country.