A quick glimpse at Navidad en la Republica

So in my campo the past few weeks everything has been pretty much frozen, with everyone on Christmas break. I've been spending a lot of time going around and visiting people in my campo, finding out about their holiday plans and making a little more progress in my game of "who is related to who in my campo" (short answer, almost everyone...) and continuing to work on my community and organizational diagnostics. I am also starting to look for my own place (exciting!) and will have to look for furniture, etc this month as well. The holiday season was full of family time. Especially in the campo, a lot of family members that have moved into the cities come back to celebrate Christmas, and especially Christmas Eve dinner with their family and their roots in the campo. So it was fun (although slightly overwhelming to have the population more then double for a few nights) to see the extended family of everyone, and to have many of my host siblings in the house for Christmas. Unfortunately, I'm about to head back to my campo, so I can't write too many details right now, but I wanted to at least share a few pictures from December:

We would spend hours every day playing dominoes, here are various relatives, eating a lot and playing dominoes:


Also, with so many people around there was a lot of food to cook, so they would often set up a fire outside and cook in a huge pot, here they are cooking plantains, potatoes, and other roots. Tasty!

Most of my host family with our Christmas Eve dinner. We had pig, chicken, meat empanadas, spaghetti, bread, grapes, apples, and little gummi candies

My host sister and some neighbors cracking open almonds to snack on, this can entertain the kids for hours, and also leads to them bringing me as many almonds as they can (it has become a competition a few times)

My 9 year old host sister showing off an almond that she just opened to eat, hopefully you can see the little almond in the middle and the thick casing it is surrounded by

I'll hopefully be able to get to the internet again in a few weeks, happy holidays everyone!