Semana Santa, aka Chipa week

I probably don’t need to remind any of you that it was Easter this last Sunday and I’m sure some of you are still trying to get rid of those extra chocolate bunnies laying around the house. Rather than chocolate, my family here is trying to eat all of the chipa that we still have sitting in a huge basket in the kitchen. Chipa is a staple food here that people eat all the time here but eat it in abundance the week before Easter, Semana Santa, or Holy Week. It is a hard, dry, bread type food that is made of corn flour and eggs and it’s main ingredient is pig fat. They say without all the pig fat it’s too dry, but I’d like to know what “dry” is because I have eaten more dry chipas than I care to count, crumbling and falling apart after 4 days of sitting, and I have had to soak it in my morning warm milk to even be able to chew on it. I have also seen my mom eat half a 4 day old chipa and throw the other half to the dog who will gnaw on it for the next 5 minutes just to get it down. By the way, did I mention I really don’t like chipa?

Whatever my opinion is, Paraguayans love chipa and they spend an entire day of Semana Santa making it. Thursday and Friday of Semana Santa are national holidays and it’s not uncommon for stores to be closed Wednesday afternoon as well, so Peace Corps graciously gave us half of Wednesday and all of Thursday and Friday off of training. I thought people were just kind of exaggerating the whole national chipa obsession until I was walking around in the city on Wednesday afternoon. The only shops that were still open were stores that were selling ingredients for chipa and sopa (another dry traditional Paraguayan dish with pig fat) for people to pick up last minute if they hadn’t planned ahead and been setting aside ingredients for the past week like my family did. Even the post office and the only real grocery store in the city were closed. What really drove the point home was the sign I saw posted outside a hardware store advertising that they still had all the ingredients for chipa in stock. Since when have hardware stores started selling chipa ingredients? “Hi, I’d like a hammer and some pig fat please.” There was a strange stillness and quietness on the streets and a mad rush in the markets still open with people standing in line for half an hour to get enough flour for their 100 chipas. One of my fellow trainees compared it to 4th of July in the US when pretty much everything shuts down except for the grocery store and Target for those last minute runs for ketchup and sparklers to complete the BBQ.

Typically, Paraguayans will bake chipa all day Wednesday, cook and eat all day Thursday, and Friday they sit around and do nothing except eat chipa. I think the point is that they are fasting, or maybe it’s because they aren’t supposed to do “work” aka cook on Friday and they think that chipa is sufficient nutrition for a day. Whatever the reason, many families don’t really follow the fast and eat sometimes both lunch and dinner (my family just did dinner) but their hesitance to follow the religious traditions of fasting does not prevent them from making hundreds of chipa to feed the family for two days if they did decided to starve themselves on a chipa diet. This Thursday and Friday of Semana Santa are two of the most important days of the year, but by the time the weekend rolls around it’s back to normal and by Sunday it’s almost forgotten that it’s Easter. It’s very strange to me that the emphasis in the culture seems to be on the death of Christ rather than the rising. Isn’t Christ rising from the dead the whole point of Easter, or did I miss something important in all those years of going to church and a private Christian college? I can’t say though that the strange obsession with chocolate, rabbits, and plastic eggs in the United States has more emphasis on the risen Christ than the 4 day old chipa that is sitting in my house. (By the way, if anyone figures out the egg/rabbit connection please let me know because I’m pretty sure my pet rabbit never laid eggs.) Maybe it’s because I used to go to church on Easter Sunday, spending the day with family and this year I sat around in the morning reading and then went to a soccer game in the afternoon where fans got so heated grown women were swearing at the other team and the police showed up to keep fans from fighting. Or maybe I’m so hungry from my unwillingness to eat leftover chipa the last couple of days that I haven’t been able to focus on what’s going on around me. Either way, as much as I enjoyed spending time off with my family and the rather rowdy and entertaining fútbol fans, I felt like there was something lacking this Easter. But while Easter was lacking, the chipa basket is not and I’m thoroughly dreading breakfast the next few days as all I will be eating in the morning is surprise, surprise, chipa that unfortunately is not getting any fresher.