Vol. xxvii #4

December, 2006

Lauren Lansing

I've been looking forward to completing my volunteer year and going home to Colorado just in time for Christmas. Not because I'm tired of the food (I can no longer imagine life without tajadas, baleadas, or pastelitos); or because I've run out of things to do at the teatro (each day is still a race to finish applications, rehearsals, and letters); or because I'm lonely (the actors and my host family have created a support system as strong as any biological family). No, it is none of those normal traveler woes; I simply want to go home to see the snow.

Having been raised in Colorado, snow has always meant Christmas is near. It is one of many traditions that bring my mind and body to the peace of Christmas. When I came to Honduras, I had to give up my traditions, along with the snow, in order to be part of the community from which I wanted to learn. By letting go for a while, I have been able to add a whole new set of traditions to my own, hopefully forming a more complete understanding of this culture that, just a short time ago, seemed so foreign.

I recently read a Maya Angelou poem called "Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem" that describes the way communities and traditions of Christmas change our perception of a world we normally see as chaotic to a world that is calm. One part of the poem says:

Thunder rumbles in the mountain passes
And lightning rattles the eaves of our houses.
Flood waters await us in our avenues.

Snow falls upon snow, falls upon snow to avalanche
Over unprotected villages.
The sky slips low and grey and threatening.

Into this climate of fear and apprehension, Christmas enters,
Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope
And singing carols of forgiveness high up in the bright air.
The world is encouraged to come away from rancor,
Come the way of friendship.

It is the Glad Season.
Thunder ebbs to silence and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner.
Flood waters recede into memory.
Snow becomes a yielding cushion to aid us
As we make our way to higher ground.

Before my journey to Honduras, I was filled with fear and uncertainty like Angelou's rain and snow. But by joining in rituals, that fear dissipated and I fashioned this community of actors like brothers, neighbors like cousins, and host families like parents. I have found the strength to understand a culture so differently chaotic from mine, making it so humanly familiar that I no longer fear it, but rely on it in order to find the "higher ground."

In forming a community out of those who were once strangers, I have also taken on their traditions, as one must to be part of any community. Everything from eating with my fingers, to biking to work, to taking a siesta at lunch, to sticking up for my favorite soccer team (Go Olympia!) have become daily activities that before felt unusual, but now seem natural. And there is no better example of accepting traditions than with the teatro's Christmas celebrations.

When I arrived at the teatro in November 2005, the actors were rehearsing their annual Christmas show Navidad Nuestra. Each day my work at the computer was accompanied by Latino carols with drums and dancing and forms of storytelling that I had never seen. The Christmas carols and stories recall a much more earthly nativity of stubborn donkeys, dirty diapers, and fearful crossings of boarders than my traditional, celestial nativity with stars, angels, and kings. At first, this seemed strange to me -- donkeys are cooperative creatures; Baby Jesus doesn't poop, and traveling from Israel to Egypt is like walking across the street, right? But as I saw the show over and over, I realized that for the people I was with, the play reflected their daily lives and to them it depicted a God literally in their back yard, not in some remote desert thousands of miles away. I realized how the tradition of presenting this production each year formed a community, both amongst the actors and between the group of actors and their audience.

The year's subsequent shows have dealt with the passion of Jesus, AIDS, gangs, and torturers; and as I complete a full circle of service here at the teatro, the actors are once again rehearsing Navidad Nuestra. After a season of such intensity, I see the problems and stresses of the theatre relieved when they start rehearsing Navidad Nuestra because it is tradition, it is something they fall into easily and calmly: celebration rather than frustration.

And for me the songs are truly familiar and the stories now recall memories of my own Honduran Christmas (even if they are more recent memories). I can even participate in the tradition myself by singing the songs or helping to work on the show; and in doing so, I grow in acceptance rather than retreat to self-centeredness. Now, in Honduras, Navidad Nuestra has become my snow.

Angelou continues her poem to show that the true tradition of Christmas is not the gifts, nor the food, and not even the snow or an annual play, but the calling forth of peace -- peace in our local and world communities.

We clap hands and welcome the Peace of Christmas.
We beckon this good season to wait a while with us.
We, Baptist and Buddhist, Methodist and Muslim, say come.
Peace.
Come and fill us and our world with your majesty.
We, the Jew and the Jainist, the Catholic and the Confucian,
Implore you, to stay a while with us.
So we may learn by your shimmering light
How to look beyond complexion and see community.

It is Christmas time, a halting of hate time.

On this platform of peace, we can create a language
To translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other.

At Christmas, we must call on peace in order to be a community, whether that is as personal as our own family or as foreign as another country. True peace abides in acceptance of the traditions and cultures with which we usually clash. But peace does not simply appear. We need to seek it, as the shepherds and kings followed the star, we need to "beckon" and "welcome" it. We must intend to see the illegal Latino immigrant, the Darfur refugee, and the Gaza Strip bombing victim as people with whom to make a community and to share traditions in order to have that true peace which we so desire. Once we stop trying to build a wall or test a bomb or invade a country, and instead begin to learn a new language, taste a new food, and listen to a new story, that is when we will have found what we seek: community, tradition and above all, peace.

So, yes, I do miss the snow and I am excited to look out my window to icy white instead of dewy green on Christmas day. But after more than a year in Honduras, I will know, as I watch flakes fall, that I have found my Honduran snow, and that the true peace I feel comes from my desire and strength to join a community of the foreign and a tradition of the forgotten.

Thank you teatro la fragua and those families of El Progreso who have truly taught me what it means to be part of a world family.

I love you all,

Lauren