Photo-tales from Mexico

As promised in the September's diary, here comes the story of our holiday-for-visa-reasons to Tapachula, in Chiapas, Mexico. Apart from some money lost due a wallet misadventure, everything went well, with a good journey, shorter than feared (only 5h45m by coach, less than 8 hours door-to-door), good accommodation, good, slightly different food (buying it at markets or take-away we chose not to have rice for 4 whole days), worthy trips and the pleasure for kids&parent of going away for it all for a simple but good holiday. Given the amount of writing we've been doing recently, we let you enjoy a photo-album with narrative captions.

Recipe

After 14 months of school, with the last 6 not totally nice, take a 9 year old boy to the Saturday morning athletics training session with his brother, father and daddy's group of teens, with a 1.5km walk from the bus-stop to the track, and let him train as hard as the older kids, with warm-up, special gaits, long jump, 2x200mts and relays; then, another walk back to the bus. Remember to check the lunar calendar and the orbit's current inclination and, if everything goes right, you might be as lucky as to conjure up the yearly event you've been longing for: the next morning, Michele will wake up, as shocked as you all ("How long have you all been awake?"), not only later than everyone else in the family, but even only 5 minutes before 8.00, that is after sleeping over 11 hours and a half!

N.B. This recipe cannot guarantee success, but it is safe: the boy will not suffer permanent changes (on Tuesday morning he woke up at 5.30).

Inspiring singing

There are many churches around here - no, that's not right...

There are myriads of churches around here (we can see a handful just looking out of our window and we lose count going by bus to the shopping centre), only a few as big as you imagine a church to be, most of them as big as a local house, some of them as small as a room. They have services on Saturday evening or on Sunday morning (and/or evening) and some of them one or two evenings per week. Being the vast majority of them on the evangelical-pentecostal side, they mostly sing, or they only sing apart from when the preacher screams at them (1). With this set of data, you can do your own calculation and grasp the amount of religious singing our hearing system undergoes on a weekly basis. Once you reach that piece of information, please add a fundamental element to the equation: most church musicians, sorry, keyboard players, around here know from three to four chords (maybe not most, only the skilled ones) and the number of tunes they can play with those is quite low, let's say it rarely passes half a dozen. 

All in all, a very grim outlook for our hears? Maybe, but wait till you read more... 

Solo singers, sometimes used by congregations for mysterious reasons, are not much better than the musicians and quite a few preachers opt to sing from the microphone, or more precisely eating the mike, though whatever kind of training they received or self-inflicted for preaching, it didn't include singing.

Still, despite the dramatic reality of the situation affecting our ears, we found this singing quite inspirational and our prayers often raise up on the wings of those notes.

Unfortunately for the local churches, the content of those prayers is not exactly benevolent towards the musicians or their instruments, the buildings or the whole congregations, or simply their electricity connections...

Actually, luckily for them, our faith has recently developed to a point where we don't really believe in supplicating prayers, so the congregations are still safe, unless one evening Mattia or Elena are too tired and can't stop the other from going outside and mete justice out by themselves.

(1) As to the preachers, we are eternally grateful to our dear friend, fellow volunteer and next-door  (behind-the-wooden-wall) neighbour Marlene who, one of her first nights here, asked us whether there are preachers coming to these small congregations or they only sing; we were scared to answer, but out of courtesy we told her that preachers do come down here. Of course, our fears came true, with a vengeance, and since that fateful conversation we've had a spate of dreadful screamers tormenting our ears even more than before.

2x14x3x3=1!

Last Friday at 12.30, our 2 extraordinaryboys have finally completed their 14th straight school month, in their 3rd different school in 3 different countries: 

from mid-August 2015, when they started 3rd and 1st grade in Rwanda,   

through a month, March 2016, in Italy,

 up to now, here in Guatemala.

(comments on the three schools in a future post).

In total, adding his first years in Ireland and nearly four months in England, Michele has already studied in primary school in 5 different countries (Sam as well, but in some he was in nursery/pre-school).

What an experience!

To celebrate the end of this long school year, at the end of which they were both surely tired but so accustomed to go to school and in general so passionate about it that they were not sure and not completely happy it was over, they received two stellar little gifts, we had a rare chocolate pudding dinner on Friday and a movie night on Saturday (to be completed...). Today, Sunday, we might travel to the city centre to take a stroll for more rewarding stuff, like some different food and a trip to our favourite playground.

The wisdom of words

Hopefully you've already noticed the new section on the right hand corner of this blog: it's going to be the place for us to present you with nice phrases we discover here, or while staying here. It will be hard to live up to the heights of the first one (go and read it if you haven't done so already!), as it is so powerful, poetic and relevant to the country, but, a bit unwillingly, we'll change it soon to stick up some new ones on our wall of words.