F&G: Holy Week

Less than three weeks to go here in Manila! We leave for Singapore on April 19, where we’ll stay for a month to do research. The weather has really started to warm up here, so we’re still jealous of seeing all that cool weather back in the U.S.

some of finished bagels

This was an especially busy week. Grace’s parents left on Sunday night during a relatively unusual summer thunderstorm. The next day, we went over to our friends’ house to start making bagels (these are the friends with an oven with whom we baked challah a while back). We shaped the bagels on Monday and left them to chill over night. The next evening, we went back to boil, bake, and eat the results (we used the recipe from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, a great book). After we ate, they showed us the litter of six kittens that they found in their back porch area one day. It seems like a pregnant cat crawled back into their fenced-in area and gave birth in a quiet, dark, corner. So now they have six absolutely tiny kittens to try to find homes for. Here’s a brief video of them just waking up and coming out to greet us.

This week has been completely shaped by Easter events. The whole city started to shut down on Wednesday afternoon. When Grace and I were coming back from our evening walk that night we ran across a giant procession of images of saints and such going down our street. It was similar to the procession we saw on Friday that we’ll write about more below.

Our street also featured two pabasas, a 24-hour reading/singing of an old Tagalog poem that basically tells the story of Jesus and creation, etc. Our neighbors read the poem into microphones attached to giant speakers. It was really interesting to see and hear these recitations (we heard they not be too common any more) but we didn’t sleep very well on Wednesday or Thursday night since the recitations went on at all hours. I made some short recordings to capture some of this: recording 1 (you can hear the girls singing above the noise of the street), recording 2 and recording 3, both from Friday morning.

Pabasa at Barangka Credit Coop, across the street from our apartment

building and decorating the hut for a pabasa down the street

pabasa going on after decorations have finished

On Friday morning we heard drumming outside our apartment so I went out to the roof with my camera to see what was going on. Turns out, there was a moving senakulo, or passion play, processing down our street. We recognized some of our neighbors in costume as drummers and soldiers. While the beating and whipping of the people playing Jesus might seem a bit extreme, I think the whips were made to have more sound than substance. Furthermore, in comparison to the actual crucifixions that go on each year in Pampanga (where people volunteer to have nails driven through their hands and all that), this seemed relatively painless. Grace had to go down to another part of Manila that day to tutor and saw several people flagellating themselves on the road, drawing blood form their bare backs with palm whips. This is also apparently not all that uncommon throughout the Philippines. Below are some photographs, but I also captured some video as the procession passed by our apartment building: video 1, video 2, video 3.

drummers leading the procession

looking on after the procession passed by our building

On Friday afternoon, our friends Mike and Peter picked us up to drive up to the town of Arayat, Pampanga, to watch a procession of images/floats that culminated in an ornate hearse with Jesus in a coffin. Some of Mike’s friends have an old 1920's home up there. He had been in years past and wanted to show it to us. It was really neat to get to see what Good Friday was like in this town at the base of Mount Arayat and, since everyone had left Manila for the weekend, it was a breeze traveling in and out of Manila, something that can’t be said very often. I also took some videos from this trip: Video 1 (view of the breeze moving decorations in front of the chapel), Video 2 and Video 3 (of the procession).