Weddings!

I feel like I should dedicate at least one post to my experiences of the weddings (“bodas”) here. I have already been to two- one in my second weekend here and the other on Halloween. Both were similar in a lot of ways… both had an extremely long “culto” (church service), complete with at least 30 minutes of straight praise music in each. The difference between the two music sets in the different bodas, though, was that in the second one the people who sang were actually the praise band for the church, so I assume there was some selection process based on musical talent in order to be a part of the group. In the first wedding, though, the people who sang were the maids of honor and groomsmen, whom I’m assuming were chosen for the part because of their personalities and not their singing abilities.

The first wedding I went to was here in the town where I live and the bride was the daughter of a cousin of my host mother. Since my family was so closely related to the bride, we went on Saturday to her family´s house to help cook multiple meals with every other female relative. When I say “we” I mean my mom… I just sat by the fire and tried to stay out of the way while distantly related children brought me flowers and asked me questions like how I changed my skin color from brown to white, what kind of shoes to people wear in my country, etc.

While I was sitting, there were at least 25 women cooking lots of different things in huge pots over the fires in the outdoor kitchen. They didn´t even seem to talk about what they were doing—somebody would just show up and start working. Finally, though, after the corn had been made into masa I could help make the tamalitos. Masa is the dough that is made from corn and then made into tortillas or tamalitos (masa put into corn husks and boiled). While we were making the tamalitos- my mom, me, and another older relative- I couldn´t talk, because the older woman didn´t speak Spanish… only Quiché. So I just kept stuffing masa into the corn husks while they talked. Sometimes, though, I´m relieved when people talk in Quiché because I can turn my brain off.

Then at about 6 p.m., before dinner, the groom´s family arrived to the house with five HUGE baskets of food and gifts for the bride´s family. The mother of the bride invited me to come into the room with her where they received the baskets so I could see what it´s like. There were pine needles all over the floor and the “guides” (an elder of the community that helps the family during weddings or other big ceremonies) from each family talked a lot in Quiché. I of course couldn´t understand what they were saying, but I think it was essentially an agreement between the two families--something more for tradition´s sake more than anything I think. I say that because I found out later that the bride had already been living with the boyfriend in his family´s house for 6 months and she was, at the time of the wedding, 5 months pregnant. This is called “robbing” or “stealing” the girl. A girl will go missing for a couple of days, and when her family is finally at wit´s end they call the boyfriend and he says that she´s now living with him. I asked my mom how this was possible considering that the boyfriends all still live with their families, and she said that a lot of times the boy´s parents know and approve, or sometimes the girl just sneaks around for a couple of days “until it´s too late,” because once she´s spent the night there, that´s it. Time to plan a wedding. Did I mention that they are 15 years old?

So after the basket giving the groom´s family left and all the people still at the bride´s house at dinner together. We left soon after dinner and returned the next morning, on Sunday, at 7:30, but we had already missed the wedding party leaving to go to what´s essentially the city hall to do the civil part of their marriage. But when the whole wedding party returned at about 10 a.m. to the bride´s house all their wedding gifts had been set out in the patio-a stove, a huge armoire and some other china cabinet type thing, along with all kinds of baskets and buckets and pots and dishes.

After that we went to the house of the groom´s family, where they both live now, for the church service (normally this part is in a church). Did I mention that the culto was extremely long… like two and a half hours??? Oh and it was really hot… oh, and I was wearing traditional traje, which is really heavy and hot. This was the first time I had worn it… my sisters and mom lent me the different parts to it… the skirt (called a corte), the shirt (a huipil) and the belt (a faja) you tie really tight around your waist to hold up the skirt.

After the ceremony, though, there was a delicious lunch of chicken and rice and vegetables. I sat across the table from the guide of the bride´s family, and he ate his whole chicken wing, sucking the meat of the bones at the end, with just one tooth in his head. No joke. On of the front ones on the bottom is all he had. I was impressed. After lunch we all sat outside and digested for about an hour before we went back in to eat bread and hot chocolate, the tradition here in my town instead of a cake. This is a good time to explain about the table and party manners here. First of all, it´s rude if you don´t suck all the meat off your bones, many people prefer to eat without silverware because “it tastes better,” and when you go to a party, everyone brings plastic bags to take home leftovers. And when there is bread laid out on the table like there was at this wedding, people just started shoving it into their bags. I´m used to it now, but this wedding was my first real “fiesta” experience in Guatemala, and I wasn´t quite sure what to do with myself.

Finally, the people who were left at the wedding (mostly just close family), all went into the bedroom of the couple. The couple sat there while the padrinos (kind of like godparents, but for special occasions like baptisms, confirmations, weddings, etc. and you might have different padrinos for each occasion) talked about marriage. He referred to domestic violence and talked a lot about respecting your parents, since they were to live with the parents of the groom. Then the madrino (the wife of the padrino couple) did this ceremonial thing of taking down the bride´s hair and putting an apron on her. Then the bride put an apron on her mother-in-law and everybody hugged and the bride said good-bye to her parents.

So that´s the (very long) description of how weddings basically work here. The other one I went to a week later was a little different…the groom was 24 and the bride was 19, but they were also pregnant, which is the way marriages work here a lot of the time (if not most of the time). This wedding, though, was in a different town where the tradition is to serve cake :)