I Don't Practice Santeria

But he does.

We went to a Fiesta de pallo on Sunday. In other words, we went to a Santeria ritual. It was at the home of a community leader (who are pretty much the only people we’re meeting here because they are all friends with one another, friendly to us, the people our technical trainer first met when she decided to do training here, etc.) Anyways, she and her family have a room dedicated to the saints. And I have a secret… we got to see it! It was full of pictures of the Virgin Mary and saints, along with candles, lots and lots of candles which really warmed up the room. Outside of that room was an altar dedicated to Saint Michael. On the altar were all the things you’d expect to see on an altar, and a cake. A big white cake, with blue icing. (I didn’t get to eat the cake.) The man engaged in the ritual was about 30 years old and had those great Dominican eyes. Some people who looked like his sister and grandmother were helping him, bringing him bandanas, cigarettes, cigars and rum. They were for the spirit that entered his body (well the bandana was to wipe away all of the sweat he was getting from the dancing and rocking back and forth). His eyes were rolled back in his head for the entire time that I saw him in the trance.

There was quite a crowd gathered outside of the area, perhaps 200 people of all ages. I tried to figure out who they were, believers, Catholics, people who wanted to watch respectfully, or not, kids gathered to walk in the parade, to dance to the drums beating, to eat that huge cake… after a while the man got up on a horse and we followed him down the street. I’m not entirely sure if he had left the trance at that point, but he looked like he was among us more so than before.
Everyone I asked about it told me they’d seen these before, and did not think of it the way us Americans did. They weren’t searching for answers about what every little detail of the ritual meant and I guess they never had before either because they really didn’t know how to answer our questions.