Semana Santa Solidaria -- Tejas!

I had the chance to go on a service trip for holy week. We left on Wednesday after classes and spent four nights in San Javier, close to where I was for the pre-program, just me and 19 Chilean students. This is an annual event for students at the PUC, and usually they go and "mission", or talk with people. This year, because of the earthquake, the sites focused on helping with construction or demolition as well. Notre Dame's travel restriction on traveling south lifted that Wednesday, so I was barely allowed to go. One condition: that I don't go near dangerous buildings that might collapse and focus on the missioning rather than construction. In fact, I went to San Javier rather than one of the other forty sites because it was supposed to be one of the safest.

Even the best plans, and I'm not claiming that this weekend was one of them, get messed up. When we got to San Javier my site leader Maria Paz spoke with the priest about the mission aspect. He said that they really weren't prepared for that and we were all expected to help with demolition. Which I was fine with, but don't let ND find out! (JK, they already know)

So San Javier has two churches, and one of them was irreparably damaged in the quake. We were asked to help remove salvagable items--tiles, doors, wood--from the building before it was finally demolished. There was a trash-filled courtyard in the middle so I decided to clean it out, keeping as close as I could to ND's orders to not go inside dangerous buildings (although you do have to walk through the building to get there. Cleaning up the trash took half an hour, maybe. Leaving me with hmmm... two and a half more days of what? I was saved when some people came out and revealed that we should also try to get all the tejas, tiles, off the roof. Without breaking them, if you please, so that they can be reused in the new church.



Therefore, I spent the rest of the weekend having tejas thrown at me and stacking them in the courtyard. I know someone has some cool pictures of our masterpiece from the end of the weekend, but I don't have access to them yet. We caught them in blankets, then eventually developed "sophisticated" systems that worked better--like a slide made from a warped board or just tossing them onto four mattresses piled on top of each other. The dust and accumulated earth on the roof made it a messy job, and it made everyone's muscles ache, but the food was good and we sang Disney and pop music. I made some Chilean friends and attended outdoor mass, as well as a Via del Cruz. Oh, and I was also told that I look like Scarlett Johansson.

Best of all, I got chocolate Easter eggs! And some boiled eggs when I got home on Sunday. Easter at it's best :)