Offering for Third Friday of Lent

So the tradition here in Antigua during lent is that each of the smaller out of town churches around Antigua host a weekend until the big Easter celebrations held in the city itself.

This involves the village creating an “offering” in the church using their local produce. This includes flowers, fruit and vegetables and coloured sawdust. This is all practicing for the Holy Week itself when the roads themselves will all be covered.

So we took a 15 minute tuktuk out to the nearby village of Jocotenango. Many people came from far and wide on the colourful “chicken buses” for the evening. A long queue led around the full square to get into the church. We queued for about 90 minutes but by the time we left the queue had doubled.

The “evangelicals” were out preaching. They seemed very angry and loud to me. Sadly there is quite strong antagonism between the catholic and evangelical traditions. The catholics have been in Central America for hundreds of years. They have done a lot of harm but they have largely fused/syncretised with the Mayan culture. The evangelicals arrived in the 1960s and teach that everything Mayan (language, sport, music) is of the devil.

Loads of food sellers were present adding to the party atmosphere selling food of every flavour. We enjoyed chatting to the family behind us in the queue who were coming to pay homage to the offering, our Spanish lessons were starting to pay off.

The offering itself was stunning in its detail and showed a lot of hard work (see photos and video). It was really interesting to see how well integrated the catholic church was with the community as all ages were out in force - unlike at home.Read more