Semana Santa

This is a picture of the church in my community and a picture of the "masks" walking down the road with their whips and group of kids.

Instead of just celebrating Easter, here in the Dominican Republic as in many latino cultures, they celebrate Semana Santa. In the Dominican Republic, Semana Santa means that most people take the whole week off of work, take a break from meetings, and don’t have school. Some people take this time to go to church more frequently. Others spend more time with their family or friends. Often people go to the river to go swimming. Some people take this vacation to drink and dance. Throughout this whole week there were warnings on the television and from my cautious neighbors to be careful on the roads because this week is notorious for traffic accidents. Often drinking, partying, and traveling to more touristy spots do not mix.

Semana Santa includes traditional dishes of “habichuelas con dulce” a sugary bean drink and “chaca” a corn meal mixed with coconut milk and other spices. These two extremely sugary dishes are delicious. It is customary to share these dishes with neighbors, family, and friends. I was full every day of Semana Santa with these delicious treats. I was often gifted 2 or more offerings of these dishes a day, which was fun.

Along with great food and family time there are some funnier traditions. One is that “the masks” often come tramping through the community. Often teenage boys dressed in masks, often in drag, and holding and lashing large whips, these kids walk around the local communities, sometimes terrifying little children to tears, but really just having fun with the community members and trying to get a laugh. My host brother was one of the masks. A 6 foot tall man coming up to me in a scary grey mask with fake long flowing black hair and a dress with leggings, holding a whip, I had no idea who he was until he told me.

At home I often get dressed up for church. Here people sometimes are dressed up to go to my small Catholic church, but getting dressed-up often means putting on clean leggings, the tightest shirt you can find, and putting in some earrings. The church in my community also serves as the community center. This is the same building where I have my women’s and youth groups. The church service is usually filled with 3 or 4 women who regularly attend, at times their grandchildren adding to about 7 or 8. In total the benches for service are usually pretty sparce. It is interesting because the priest is only at the church once a month, sometimes missing a month. The other weeks a local young man leads the services, reading from a donated book from a church in San Juan. This man and another literate women take turns with reading directly from this book. The service is often approximately a half an hour. When the priest does attend the service, he dresses in his traditional white gown and gives communion. Still, only approximately 3 or 4 people take communion because many people in my town have not had first communion, as their has never been a highly functioning church in my community. Some community members, such as my host sister, obstain from taking communion because they are living in sin. For example, my host sister has three children with her husband that she lives with, yet their marriage is not legally recognized nor recognized by the Catholic church, this is the most common living arrangement in my community and potentially the DR.

It is hard to say if the priest does not come more often because not many members of the community come to the services or not many members of the community come to the services because there is no priest. It is like who came first? The chicken or the egg? Anyhow, the vast majority of my community consider themselves Catholic, even if they have never or very rarely have gone to a Catholic church service. My local church is now trying to recruit more people to their services, especially youth. The recruitment is slow. I wonder what the future of these services are, if the congregation is already so low and hardly any youth attend these services. I would be very interested to see how organized religion shifts in the DR as this next generation emerges.