Mother's Day in Guatemala

Mother's Day was a very festive two day celebration here in town. The morning started out with a celebration in the center of town for one of the schools that Liz is working at. Here she is introducing her game for the mothers, because here Mother's Day is a day to make moms stand in front of a crowd and compete for plastic utensils, like bowls and strainers and cups. Its kind of like a tupperware party competition, only the tupperware is super cheap and donated by the local political party. At any rate, it was an entertaining morning. They celebrated the oldest and the youngest moms in the audience, the oldest being in her 60's and the youngest being 15 with a one year old strapped to her back. I felt a little strange clapping for her achievement and stranger still when she was given a gift for said accomplishment. 

 One of the other ways that Mother's Day, and almost any other day worth celebrating here is celebrated, is with choreographed lip syncs. Typically there is a male singer in front who knows just enough break dance moves to make him feel confident (usually 1-2) and in between these break dance moves he waves his hands in front of his face a lot while the girls in the back look back and forth at each other to confirm that they are in fact all doing more or less the same dance move. Not quite sure how much the mothers enjoyed it, but its the thought that counts, right moms?

 In between celebrations, Lizzy was able to get a family picture with Lydia, Melissa and Brian on our roof. How cute are they in their traditional dress?

 Moving to the next celebration in Chonimacorral. I thought I had walked into a frat party with some of the contests. This one the women raced to chug a bottle of coke. The winner also won something made of plastic that could be used in the kitchen.

 Here they had to blow up a balloon to the point of popping. Unfortunately the balloons were of higher quality and we almost had one of the women pass out before anything came close to popping. We ended up voting on who had blown theirs up the biggest.

Here is the 3rd celebration for me in Cuesta del Aire. The rain was so loud on the tin roof of the school that no one could hear much of anything being said. After an hour the power went out and the 3 hour program was scrapped.

 Here the students are singing to their mothers before the power went out.

 These little girls really wanted a picture taken of them after they ran out and played in the rain.

 After the power went out everyone rushed to clean up all the decorations, then it turned into a big photo shoot since my students saw that I had my camera.

 Here are the 7th graders after cleaning up everything. It was a lot of fun, too bad the power cut out on them. Happy mother's day to all the moms out there. Thanks for having us kids and know that you are loved and appreciated...even if we didn't send you cheap plastic kitchen utensils.