We woke up this morning early and had a nice breakfast of tomatoes, olive oil, jam, and homemade bread at 8 am! Then we all went to La Casa Africana, a meeting space for the FES community and talked about our personal goals for this week. We also established a few different leadership roles and signed a group contract to help us all keep our morale up throughout the week.
We split into four different work groups and met our “ambassadors,” teenagers from FES who would teach us about the work we were doing. There are four jobs for the groups at FES: bread making, working in the garden, helping in the workshops with ceramics and other crafts, and creating the mural that will commemorate our visit.
The bread making group made the bread that we later ate at lunch, and two different cakes: chocolate, and vanilla with orange; they were both delicious!
In the garden, we planted eggplant and pepper seedlings and helped weed. We also created a design for the mural, which will be a heart with a background of the US and Spanish flags, with the words that make up the acronym SPICES, an acronym that stands for the six Quaker testimonies, in Spanish and English.
After a nice lunch, where we got to integrate ourselves with the other members of the FES community, we all got ready to go into Granada for a Semana Santa procession, dinner, and a late night Easter Mass. For dinner we split up into groups and enjoyed various delicacies along a long street of restaurants; among the foods we sampled were olives, manchego cheese, octopus, cured meats, tortillas, croquettes, and more. One group even got to cook their own dinner!
After dinner and an ice cream break (el dulce de leche está riquísimo) we went to the procession. The procession was beautiful, with a large parade full of hundreds of participants in traditional garb, heralded by Spanish music. Once the procession ended, with the statue of the Virgin Mary and Christ being carried by dozens of men into the Cathedral, we went to Mass in a different church. The Mass, entirely in Spanish, included many songs, a priest’s spattering of holy water, and a communion at the end — for some of us, our first. Finally, we returned to FES for much-needed rest.
