Foreign Mass

I guess I should start off with Saturday night. We tried the Mexican restaurant in town for dinner. It was quite good and everyone enjoyed it. It’s just a small place with only 6 menus. While we were there the tv was on the whole time playing games shows in Spanish. They also had a couple of pool tables there. Everyone wants to try to go back around once a week…..we may be able to work it into the food budget.
The next night a few other corps members and I went to church. There is a small local Catholic church in Alpaugh with a 5pm Spanish mass. On the way to mass all of us were quite nervous. We had no idea if the would be 5 or 55 people there, and what we did know is that there would be a big language barrier.
We walked into the church and there was a glass with water by the door. Ashley, being the first one through the doors, dipped her fingers in the glass as if it’s holy water. Whitney, who is right behind her starts to worry that Ashley just put her fingers in someone’s drinking glass since that’s what it looked like. In the end we saw others use the glass as holy water too so we we’re ok. But when we first entered we also saw two rooms and people were in both of them. We weren’t quite sure where to go so we just took some chairs close to the entrance. As we waited more and more people showed up until the two small rooms were packed.
Before mass started a woman got up and spoke to the parish for a while. It felt like she kept asking questions but non of us could understand what she was saying. At one point some people raised their hands while we all just sat there looking confused. Then as the mass got started we all just went through the motions without understanding anything. At least the 4 of us that went are Catholic so we could basically follow along. Although we thought we would be able to do all the responses in English but it gets a lot more confusing than you would imagine. Then when communion came around a lot of people in the back stood up and made a line. We waited patiently for when our row would head up but before we knew it only the 2 people on the inside of our row had received communion and sat back down. It turns out only 50% or less of the church actually goes up for communion…so we missed it. We attempted to sing along during mass since we had the words to the songs. But it was very difficult to find the tune….not everyone was singing together. Overall it was quite the experience.
As we left into an uncommon rain shower the priest was shaking peoples hands. As we passed him he changed to saying “Gob bless you” in English. So we’re going to go to mass again next weekend and maybe we can speak with the priest afterwards.
Well that is the story of church in Alpaugh….now to right another blog.