Good Friday Santo

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace.

In this world you will have trouble. But take heart!

I have overcome the world.”

John 17:33

As a dislocated traveler on the other side of the terrestrial orb, all of the holidays that we have celebrated in Argentina have left me feeling rather out of joint. My summertime Christmas, as you may remember, turned the familial celebration from inside to outdoors, and, in the interest of comfort, conviviality, and not dying of dehydration or water-shortage related ailments moved from day to night. While we may immediately recognize that the meals and rituals that families and communities celebrate in all corners of the Western Hemisphere in the name of joyful celebration and offering on December 24/25 take on a variety of forms depending on culture, I only realized during my time in Argentina that it also depends on climate (itself a determinant of culture). I asked the question “Do people tend to enjoy celebrations in hot or cold climates more?” and its corollary: “Do more people go to parties when it’s hot or cold?”. After a couple of comments from my stateside collaborators, my hypotheses on these questions were all cast in doubt and I ultimately threw up my hands and thanked God for the opportunity to develop a sharper sensitivity to the role of climate and weather in cultural production (translation: I’m even more curious about the way the weather affects the way we party.)

After passing through the Christmas season in a somewhat hazy state, product of the new experiences and observations as well as a strange low-grade fever that Angela and I passed back and forth for a couple of weeks, I eagerly awaited Lent for more new symbolism and rituals. Our Lent, however, has been less than conventional, even by Argentine standards. We missed an Ash Wednesday celebration (miercoles de cenizas), despite the fact that we were at a protestant seminary at a conference on Gender in the Old Testament. For some reason, in the dense gathering of pastors and church leaders from around the country nobody thought of organizing a local Ash Wednesday celebration (perhaps because most of these church leaders went back to their home congregations to hold services there, leaving us out of town people to fend for ourselves).

Without the usual Ash Wednesday service, I only slowly and partially entered into the Lenten frame of mind, one that for the typical Lutheran (dare I say, protestant, or Christian?) is a time of reflection and waiting. We censor our speech and our actions with an awareness that 1) most of what we do is a sin and our sins are about to cost Jesus his life; 2) Jesus and the historical Jewish communities went through similar periods of discernment; and 3) struggle and sacrifice are a part of the world, even if they are not part of the discourse of consumption-driven contemporary life, so we should consciously makes ourselves struggle at least a little bit just to see what its like. I know that some readers, some theology students especially, may feel like this is unjust to the Lutheran community, but I think it captures the paradoxical depth and superficiality of Lenten rituals quite nicely.

In some parts of Latin America, Lent is an intense time to be religious (religious = Catholic) because popular and personal struggles against injustice and marginalization intersect with the holy narrative and as Lenten reflection moves people to identify with Jesus’ sacrifice, hopes for salvation and resolution become accentuated. The need for salvation is then celebrated in extravagant ceremonies, processions and spectacles that require acres of flowers and fabric to properly equip. Resistencia is not one of these spiritual centers. While Buenos Aires and Asunción, Paraguay, are famed for their Semana Santa celebrations, Resistencia has maintained a pretty low profile. When I casually ask friends about Lenten and Easter traditions, they either blankly look back at me or say “Nada”. Despite the fact that a stereotypical anthropological assessment would be quite boring, our Good Friday was anything but.

Semana Santa is a traditional Christian celebration that stretches from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday, seven days of intense physical symbolism that reenact/remind/recall Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem after three years of ambulant ministry and his subsequent arrest, trial, and crucifixion at the hands of angry Jewish leaders and their worried Roman custodians. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of Holy Week in the Lutheran tradition are infrequently celebrated, but the local Catholic church held mass everyday, reading passages about Jesus’ last conversations with his followers before his tragic sacrifice would unfold. Maundy Thursday (what does Maundy mean?) is the paradoxically jubilant/morose celebration of Jesus’ last hours with his disciples, sharing with them the santa cena (Holy Communion, Last Supper, the Bread and the Wine) before wandering out to the olive grove to be arrested after Judas’ treacherous kiss. After a long night of trials, arguments, accusations, denials, parabolic answers and violent reprisals, the Good Friday dawn breaks and Jesus’ is presented to the Roman government. Despite Pilate’s best attempts to convince the Jewish leaders that what they were doing didn’t make any sense, he orders Jesus to be crucified in order to pacify a mob that was becoming increasingly agitated and, perhaps, revolutionary. This is how it came to pass that Jesus of Nazareth was taken to Golgotha to suffer a tortuous death on a cross alongside convicted criminals, the same sequence of events that we remember on Good Friday, the most morbid and depressed festival in the Church calendar. Gracias a Dios, the story isn’t left off here, but continues on to Easter Sunday, when Jesus’ body disappears from the tomb and Mary Magdalene delivers the good news about his resurrection and triumph over sin and death to the despairing (and mostly clueless) disciples.

The church has adopted a number of symbols and rituals in order to communicate the emotive and spiritual importance of all of these events, including the waving of palm branches and physically moving processionals, the dismantling of the altar on Maundy Thursday, the washing of feet, the stations of the cross (otherwise known as the Passion), covering windows with blackout sheets, singing single verses of hymns over several days to focus on the specific meaning (and relative difference) between the sentiments contained in the lyrics, etc. The range of symbolism and its relatively rapid development from joy to pain and back to joy (situated in a broader narrative of struggles for justice and understanding), has fascinated me from a very early age, making Holy Week one of my favorite events in the Church year, and while this year my Lenten experience was quite different from past years, Holy Week has not failed to challenge my assumptions about the Church and its place in the world.

This story should properly begin on Jueves santo, Maundy Thursday (seriously, what does Maundy mean?). When I went out to the barrio on Thursday afternoon, I was distracted by my somewhat unproductive day and concerns about what was going to be expected of me when I got out to the mission (I had no idea). After playing with the kids for a while, cleaning up a lot of spilled paint, eating some wonderful arroz con leche and closing up the after-school program, Angela and I wandered over to the Paez household, a wonderfully kind family comprised of four energetic kids that are always at the mission with us and their compassionate parents. After throwing around a Frisbee under the streetlight and twirling the kids around a bit, we went back to the mission to find the pastor ready for the service. As we got started, I was surprised to see that the small chapel filled up! Women and children from around the neighborhood showed up and filled up the eight benches; people who come every week sat next to their friends and neighbors that we usually just see out in the street. We had over twenty worshippers, dressed up and ready to worship together as a community. My knowledge of Latin and Greek isn’t very profound, but I was struck by the relationship between the words “community” and “communion” (or rather, between comunidad y comunión, but it makes sense in translation too). Gathering together, in common conditions and with similar hopes for salvation, we consciously and willfully come together through rituals, a kind of reciprocal relationship in which the people and the ritual work together to overcome differences in opinion and individual circumstances. As we left the chapel in silence after dismantling the altar, the seriousness of the moment didn’t linger long, and the laughter of the many children playing outside in the street accentuated the joy of seeing each other and many smiles and hugs and kisses were exchanged before retiring for the evening.

Now, it was Good Friday. After sucking down some mate to get our bodies and minds organically going in the morning, we headed out to the bus stop and joined the one other person on her way towards the barrio. Resistencia was, for all intents and purposes, shut down. Everything except for a few megabusinesses (Carrefour, the local pharmacy chain) was closed for viernes santo. Not even the local paper came out. The desertedness of the morning’s metropolitan vista was simultaneously discomforting and wholesome, like something out of a body-snatchers movie that made a town look completely normal. I was happy to see that a Christian observance was so important to so many people, but the way that that impact manifested itself was like something I had never seen before, Christianity taking people out of the world instead of committing them to it. Or maybe, instead, it was committing them to a different kind of world, one in which their families, neighbors and personal well-being took precedence over bill-paying and consumerism, one in which they didn’t need to travel across town to be at peace. Perhaps even in a globalized world staying home isn’t sitting out.

After a rather solitary walk from the bus stop to the mission, Angela assembled her flute and ran through some hymns with Raul as several people arrived for the service. While not quite as packed as the night before, the benches creaked under the shifting weight of several women and children, a few were apparently new to the chapel. The notes from Angela’s flute gave life to a celebration of death in a paradox that I’m sure wasn’t lost on anyone, as joy and sorrow mixed together under the sun (the mission celebrates weekend services on Saturday nights, so Maundy Thursday felt like the norm while Good Friday morning was oddly illuminated). To complete the picture, the service was punctuated by the entrance, exit and expectation of several barrio dogs.

The missionary experience as part of the ELCA is an odd one because it takes smart, capable and willing people that are used to being in control and situates them in a minefield of power relationships that requires a commitment to understanding interpersonal and international relationships. One of the missions of the YAGM program specifically is to equip young Lutheran leaders with the knowledge and theology produced by their companion churches, i.e. how Argentina’s view of the Good News and how it may or may not play out with and/or around a US context. I explain this to highlight the simple fact that Good Friday is Argentine.

Without embarking on his multipart sermons as usual, Pastor Raul highlighted the similarities between Jesus’ crucifixion and the desaparecidos of the last military dictatorship. Some 30,000 people were killed and disappeared by government men driving Ford Falcons from 1976 to 1983, with the complicity and approval of the US government’s anti-communist, neoliberal foreign policy (for more reading on this, see Naomi Klein’s fantastic The Shock Doctrine). Holding a thin, medium-sized wooden cross in his hands, Raul reminded the congregation of their shared experience of a stone-faced government structure that was responsible for killing progressive, justice-minded people in the name of keeping the peace, and the wounds that such a policy had left on generations of Argentines. Impunity and incompetency in government, fueled by mistrust, apathy and cynicism in the populace, unable to reinvest their spirits in the way that the young Argentines of the 1970s had done. These people know what it was like to witness the crucifixion and as we sat there in the chapel, my feeling of sorrow was punctuated in two ways: first by the loud explosions of sound that interrupted the gospel reading as kids outside through rocks onto the tin roof of the mission, a frequent expression of destructive boredom that replaces the profound emptiness of marginalized poverty with a brief moment of destructive productivity, and second, by the vision of the barrio and others surrounding it: people slowly walking and riding bikes, at the same time hopelessly and hopefully looking up to see a passing car, curious about where its coming from and where its going, thinking about what they have to do, but painfully aware that they don’t have the time or resources to get it all done.

After spending the afternoon with the Pastor and his wife, on the way home Angela and I had another vision of Good Friday, also distinctly Argentine, but in a very different way. In the Plaza 25 de mayo, the four square-block central square of Resistencia, a team of youthful actors were processing the Stations of the Cross, the vía crucial, accompanied by music and narration from loudspeakers wired up the light posts. Surrounded by hundreds young adults, families with children, most perched on papa’s shoulders, and older couples pouring mate as they walked, the Passion story became an odd spectacle of violence and repression with a very different political bent. Whereas Raul’s message in the morning service at the mission reminded the people that they had suffered pain at the hands of an unjust government that had marginalized them historically and presently, the band of young men clad in cardboard armor and shepherd-like sheets distanced the crowd from any experience of pain and suffering, offering as a substitute the pity for an actor that suffered nothing more than fake floggings at the hands of over-committed Roman impersonators. It might help to note hear that the vía crucial had to pass in front of the provincial government offices in its final phases, and that the cathedral and final site of the procession was recently opened after several months of renovations financed by the provincial coffers, and personally approved by the governor in the early days of Holy Week. This kind of ecclesial-official collaboration may not be novel or even necessarily harmful, but it certainly struck me as an odd juxtaposition of images on a day that I had thought Argentines understood all too well.

Ultimately, though, the two Argentine Good Fridays reveal the struggle that contemporary Christians have with Jesus’ sacrifice: was his suffering human or divine? Was he predestined to be tortured, or does his crucifixion serve as a lesson for social justice? Was he killed by Jews or Gentiles, his own or his enemies? The Easter story should earn a lot of postmodernity points for insinuating these questions without giving too many fixed answers, emphasizing instead the movement from pain to resolution. How we get there and how we got here, we will probably never know. But before the stone gets rolled away, it keeps hope locked up for a few days, and while it may be uncomfortable, it’s a common reality for billions of people around the world. The better we understand it, the more we experience it, the better we can relate with those individuals, which is what Jesus instructs his disciples to do before his ascension: go forth and baptize, make disciples and teach. We can only accomplish those tasks if we can establish trust, which first requires understanding, sympathy and compassion.

Photography

Last fall, sometime in October, the camera that we brought down here with us was damaged after taking a spill out of my bag onto a tile floor roughly a meter below. We were able to get it to work for a while, but in the first week of November, it decided that it was done. We mailed it to an authorized repair company in Buenos Aires (the closest location), and received a call back two weeks later that the camera’s central circuit had to be prepared, at a cost of almost $600 pesos ($200 U$D), and that it would take at least a month to repair (this is at the beginning of December). After some family debate, we decided that it taking pictures in the near future was too important to us, and that the cost for repair was on the level of buying a new camera, so we went to one of the local electronics stores and bought a new camera (at approx. 150% its US value – that’s what you get for tariff protection).

Our experience with the camera produced within me a lot of turmoil. While my parents could easily testify that I’ve never been good at taking care of my belongings, my responsibility for this loss was quite painful. The quantity of photos that I couldn’t take made me feel incredibly guilty, which I think reveals a lot about some very typical attitudes towards photography:

1) I felt guilty that I wouldn’t be able to share photos of my experience friends, family and collaborators at home. As if I had robbed these people of an opportunity, I vividly imagined the disappointment that would certainly be expressed when I explained that I didn’t have any pictures of the Christmas lights because I had been careless. While I may have allowed myself to get a little carried away with this thought, it is useful to recognize that we often think about others when we take pictures. More often than not, I assume, we think about showing others how cool we are (a thoroughly egotistical attitude) through our pictures: “Look at this beautiful picture of us on the beach” we say, meaning “don’t you wish that YOU could go? We’re so cool (rich, cultured, insert appropriate adjective here). But we also take pictures thinking about others’ interests and to genuinely communicate events and feelings. Snapping a picture of a neat flower for a friend interested in gardening, or of a scene that can help explain everyday habits or a special event (e.g. a home and/or a parade).

2) I felt REALLY guilty for somehow destroying my own experience of events here, as if I could only participate if the black bag containing my camera was at my side. This feeling was especially strong in the first few weeks after I broke the camera when people asked me, “Well, don’t you have your camera?” Do we have experience for the experience itself or to create memories that can occupy us later? It seems that I too easily began to think this latter thought, without realizing that pictures are almost always supplemental to an event (not being a photographer, nor primarily concerned with documentation, my motives for taking pictures were not professional). I reflected, then, on my worries and realized that we are in fact quite fortunate to have camera phones (which are quite common in Argentina, more so than digital cameras) because they allow us to take pictures without worrying about it too much… we don’t have to make a lot of special accommodations to snap a picture and have a good chance at capturing a moment to share it with others or ourselves at a later moment. Picture-taking becomes less cumbersome and allows us to focus on experiences.

3) I predicted that I would feel guilty in the future for not taking pictures of events. This worry won out the debate over whether to replace the camera immediately, proving to be so important to Angela and I that we couldn’t eliminate the vanity and pride latent within it. My thought process probably looked something like this: if I don’t take a picture of it now, I’m going to forget that it happened (or at least how it happened), which is something that I’m going to want to know later; if I can’t get that information later, I’m going to be angry with myself and not have any possibility of (ab)solution, so I better make sure that I take pictures to avoid pain later in life. Being concerned with memory-making is important to telling stories, building relationships and maintaining our identity, but getting obsessive about it can certainly be unhealthy. It makes me think about how we never had a videocamera in my family when we were growing up, and how thankful I am that I didn’t have to perform in front of a camera at every turn, from first step to diploma, with every piano recital and pinewood derby in between. Preserving memories and creating them are different processes, and we must make sure that our actions are balanced.

These three points describe the pain that I felt during those two months that we didn’t have a camera, but let me describe to you the importance of cameras in our experience here that put weight upon these ideas.

In the barrio, the camera is one of the most treasured objects for the kids and the talleres because it allows the kids to perform, and to see themselves having fun. Whenever someone takes a picture, kids usually crowd to get in front of the lens, throwing their arms out and showing large grins while yelling the word “Guisqui!” (this word produces the toothy grin that US tourists evoke with the word “cheese!”). The kids then rush the cameraperson, trying to get a glimpse of the digital display of the photo, catching a glimpse of themselves and smiling and jumping around, hoping for another shot. While taking a camera into the talleres usually requires a lot of patience, the joy that it can produce is remarkable. Again, one can easily note the relationship that picture-taking has with identity and experience: “I was there”, “I know him”, “this is what I saw” are all pretty common statements that one makes when narrating a selection of photos from a trip. Such a powerful activity can become trivial when we focus on pixel size and data storage, but photography can be a very important way of getting to know ourselves and other people.

Keeping these lessons in mind, I’d like to conclude by talking about taking a camera on vacation. I HATE tourists and I hate BEING a tourist even more. To explain, I don’t think that all people that travel are tourists… I think of a tourist as a person to wants to experience other places in a very superficial way, without respect for local customs and without awareness for the way that their presence impacts the place that they are visiting. So as I think about a tourist, I think of the somewhat cliché image of a person with a camera around their neck, loudly criticizing the meal that he/she has just eaten as they shuffle along a busy sidewalk on their way from the hotel to the city plaza, stopping in the middle of a flow of pedestrians to clumsily take their camera out of a case, try to get the “perfect” shot of his/her spouse in front of a scene, hopelessly unaware of the fact that the enterprise is forcing dozens of people to walk in the street, to stop what they are doing, etc. Give someone a camera, and this bound to happen at some point, because not only do we need time and space to deal with the settings on the little machines, we also suddenly become possessed by the desire to get that “perfect shot”.

I am no exception. While I may at times exercise some restraint and not stop to take a picture of the National Library in Chile, for example, I do kick myself for not taking that picture now (or rather, Angela mocks me for not letting her take the picture because I was worried that we would look awkward on the sidewalk). We want to have pictures to record our experiences, but the act of taking a picture changes that experience. Instead of saying that “I visited the Palacio de la Moneda in Chile”, we say “I took this picture in front of the Palacio de la Moneda in Chile” (Palacio de la Moneda is the Chilean President’s offices, currently occupied by Michelle Bachelet). “I visited” vs. “I took a picture”… two very different kinds of experience, right?

My fear of being a tourist is probably faulty, but it is very real. I don’t want to get in the way, not just for personal security reasons, but also because I want people to know that I respect the experience that I’m having. I probably also want the experience to be more “real” by keeping the camera out of it… but why would it be any more real? Of course, some places are just “touristy”, built for people from a wide variety of backgrounds to visit. These places are often “set aside” to allow people to take pictures (usually everyone wants the same picture – people holding up the leaning tower of Pisa, or the clearly marked, Kodak-sponsored spots at specially appointed landscapes in Disneyworld).

Cameras are an important part of many middle- and upper-class individual’s and families’ lives, and they can be great tools for memory making, but their use can also distract us from other kinds of experiences.

To apply some of these ideas to a specifically Christian discussion of experience and memory: what would Moses say about taking a picture of the Red Sea during the Jewish diaspora from Egypt, or how about if the disciples had told Thomas to look at the pictures that they had taken of Jesus instead of getting him to come to their meeting to experience Jesus’ presence himself?

Why yes, that was my picture in the Lutheran!

It has come to my attention that my photo recently appeared in the Lutheran magazine, that excellent publication of the ELCA. The image is also available online. I´m honored to be in the magazine!
The photo comes from a September visit by Twila Schock, who is part of the Global Mission staff for the church. She spent some time getting to know our context and the communities in which mission contacts occur. I am pictured with Dayana, a young lady from the barrio who comes to the talleres frequently. She is a sweetheart!

Bolivia and Lithium

A few months ago, I visited Bolivia for a conference of indigenous women. This turns out to be a very interesting year to have visited Bolivia, as both the president and the natural resources of the country have gotten a lot of press time in the American media. Recently, several major newspapers have reported on Bolivia´s large lithium deposits (possibly half of the world´s supply) and lithium´s potential importance to a developing “green” energy supply. I found the New York Times´ (and other papers´ coverage) rather slanted, as those same stories express frustration with the Bolivian government, which is refusing to simply yield the lithium to foreign investors, wishing for some or most of the income from the mineral to remain in the country. I am not much of an expert on international business, but the lovely, dignified complex that held the conference was funded by the newly nationalized natural gas industry. Wouldn´t it be great if the lithium in the soil could not only contribute to rechargable batteries but also to building schools and houses and hospitals all over Bolivia? I hope for the best for the beautiful, embattled country and its enthusiastic but impoverished peoples.

First time in five months...

I saw (am seeing) my parents today! They arrived in Buenos Aires this morning and we are presently at our Bed and Breakfast getting ready to go eat some Argentine steak with friends. Thank God for safe travel, family, and fellowship.

Holidays in Argentina

We are doing well here in Resistencia, although we´re about to head off on vacation to other parts of the country! We´re very excited and have been spending much time on the internet trying to find literary pilgrimages to take.

Today is The Three Kings day, in case you were keeping track. Parents and children fill stores looking for gifts from the reyes magos.

Anyway, as the rest of the world (and Argentina too) copes with the worldwide financial crisis, there´s another crisis here, much less documented internationally: la crisis de moneda, the coin crisis. The gist of the coin crisis is that everyone fears s/he will run out of coins, and therefore shops try very hard not to give you coins as change. We´re not entirely sure how this situation began, but we think it is mostly fear-mongered. Having everyone hoard all spare change cannot help circulate it much. The situation does seem based in Buenos Aires, though, where the buses only accept fare by coin. In Resistencia, the rumors of the situation are much more dire than the reality, since the buses here accept all coins (denominations up to the oh-so-desireable one-peso coin) and bills up to twenty pesos (although they´ll glare at you for more than a five-peso note).

This situation is complicated by the difficulties in breaking 100-peso bills, which are all that ATMs dispense. So one has to plan a bit to get money that you can actually spend. I find that stores are less grouchy about accepting a hundred-peso note if you offer coins to help out, and about returning coins if you offer small change.

At the moment, we are hoarding coins like Scrooge so we can explore Buenos Aires to our hearts´ content. Neither of us have ever done extensive backpacking before, but we´ve got a bunch of hostels picked out that look pretty groovy from their websites.

We passed a lovely Christmas and New Year´s here in the Chaco. The fiestas (party season, holidays) are relatively low-key compared to the states--people seem to prepare for about two weeks instead of a month and a half. There were Christmas lights all over town, which was comforting. On Christmas Eve, we went to our pastor´s house, where after midnight we shared the traditional pan dulce (sweet bread--but with little pieces of fruit in it) and sidra, a champagne-like citrus drink. Christmas Day really was not as big of a deal as the night before. EVERYTHING shut down then, but by the afternoon on the 25th taxis and buses were running again, and we were able to get into an internet café to call our families, which was wonderful.

Then we spent New Year´s Eve in the barrio, which was fabuloso! One of the families of the church shared their asado with us, so we were with about 30 people (extended, extended family), all of whom we hugged and kissed as midnight passed us into 2009. Again, the sidra and the pan dulce were everywhere. The kids all threw tons of firecrackers (also a Christmas pastime), filling the air with the smoke of their deep, deep happiness.

New Year´s Day we had an afternoon asado with our marvelous pastor and his wife, then passed the day listening to his collection of quality Argentine music and looking at photos and artwork. What a way to start the new year! It seems like a great start.

Like so many of our experiences here, I can´t really say if that was the "typical" Argentine way to pass the holidays, but it was our way, and we had a lot of fun.

It´s sad, however, that many people have begun the new year with terror, hunger, and warfare. We think of the conflict in the Middle East and the Palestinians who are suffering so greatly from the situation. May Christ whose coming we celebrate at Christmas bring peace, quickly, to his homeland.

ArgenTime

So I noticed that it has been quite some time since I posted in this blog. In the intervening time, I´ve been globetrotting a bit--an indigenous women´s convention in southern Bolivia, a YAGM retreat with the other volunteers in Uruguay, touristing it up in Montevideo, and several assorted smaller trips. All of those experiences someday will become profound and well-written personal essays as well as blog posts, of course. But in the meantime, I am passing days with beautiful, charming children, teaching recorder and yoga, drawing a lot, and reconfiguring my perceptions of time.

Adjusting to Argentine time has been one of the more difficult cultural changes for me. The stereotypes of promptness or lack thereof in Latin America are not especially true here--buses run on time, for the most part, and businesses keep regular hours, for the most part, and people arrive to appointments roughly on time. Readers who know me well know that I begrudge no one their extra fifteen minutes for a coffee date, so a slightly relaxed approach to scheduling is just fine with me! I hypothesize that increased dependence on public transport, which runs frequently but irregularly, creates a half-hour cushion around most stated times.

However, many things do not run on exact times. There are basically four times in Resistencia: mañana, morning, which runs about 6-12; siesta, nap-time, which runs about 12-4; tarde, or afternoon, from 4ish to 9ish; and noche, night, from 10ish on. When scheduling events in the barrio, it´s much more common to indicate that it will happen in one of these times than labeling a more specific point on the clock. Much of this is logistical, as the great majority of the families involved in the church live close enough to the building that they can easily see if the pastor´s van shows up, if Jake or I am waiting outside the building, or if their neighbors come by to suggest that the event start. It just isn´t necessary to be much more specific than morning, afternoon, or evening: Events starts when the people involved show up. Stores open when the owner gets there, and close when s/he leaves.

Also, because of the severe heat here in the spring, summer, and fall (and sometimes during the winter, too), nearly every business in town closes during the siesta hours. Practically, this means that if someone (almost always the woman of the household) is not available to do morning shopping, families can´t easily get food. I am sure that many people find ways around this, but it is strange for me realizing that I must have my mornings free if Jake and I are to have bread and fresh produce. I spend half an hour to an hour every morning going to the four stores that supply us with food (the bakery, the meat shop, the vegetable shop, and the supermarket). If this schedule does (almost) compel households to have a stay-at-home woman or a domestic worker, it can also be used to empower women. In the barrio, an elementary school for adults that did not finish-the vast majority women--runs during this time when the rest of the city closes down. This opens up many opportunities; one woman recently explained to me that because of her advancing education, she can now do her own banking!

In addition to the local times, the church year and liturgical time direct my consciousness and support the life of the Misión. I feel "at home" celebrating Advent, in a new country, with a new congregation of believers, but connected to the same God and the same Biblical narratives of Christ´s coming birth. Like most Lutheran churches during Advent, also, we are preparing the Christmas pageant, figuring out which of the squirming, lovable children will portray María, which will be angels, and who will tutor them in memorizing their Lines.

And underneath the whole Misión is God´s time for the project. Often I want God to work a miracle, to make the economic difficulties, the addictions, the hunger, the curable diseases in the barrio disappear--or at least to hurry along the people in demanding their rights. Working with individuals, with systems, with communities to build the Kingdom of God takes lots of time, sometimes very slow-moving time. And sometimes the building bricks are invisible to me, and I need those that I accompany to explain to me, patiently, that my frustrations actually represent advances--that the occasional chaos of the center represents happy interactions that would have been impossible some years before, that the slowness of opening a new project represents women in the community, rather than outside agents, learning to operate the project themselves, that an older child teaching a younger child a game that to me seems meaningless represents a positive interaction instead of continued cycles of violence. Learning to wait on God´s time requires patience that I sometimes think I lack, but it allows small rituals and daily interactions the dignity they are due, and the recognition of God´s hand in the quotidian and mundane.