Easter Alfombra 2001 ...Our 5th year of celebrating our hermanamiento.

This year the Sister Parish committee came through with flying colors. Once again, a wonderful piece of art was constructed to share with the parish. This year’s alfombra pictured a young Guatemalan girl making a traditional back-strap weaving. The text read “Weaving a Dream.” The young girl was selected because the committee wanted to do something related to the young people in both parishes. The phrase “Weaving a Dream” is symbolic of the shared vision of building a better world for our children. They selected the Guatemalan weaving because Guatemalans continue to struggle to preserve this part of their culture. For those of you who have traveled to Guatemala, you may have actually seen someone doing back-strap weaving in person. Fabric and textiles are important reasons that SJA is connected to a parish in Guatemala. When we were in the process of making a decision about what country with which we wanted to be associated, one of the members of our committee worked in the fabric industry and encouraged our group to look at Guatemala because of their traditional weaving.

Our committee creates the alfombra (carpet) at Easter-time as a sign of solidarity with our Sister Parish in Tierra Nueva Dos, Guatemala. It is also a wonderful opportunity for us to share something from their culture with our Minnesota parish.

The alfombra itself is a sawdust carpet and is made with great effort and dedication. In Guatemala during the Lenten season, processions leave from the church. Ahead of the processions, people make the carpets on the street in front of their homes as a sign of their faith in God, devotion, as well as to pay tribute to Jesus' sacrifice. In Guatemala, a lot of the carpets are made with fresh flowers, pine needs and colored sawdust. Needless to say, in Minnesota, it would be prohibitively costly to use fresh flowers.

Prior to Saturday, our committee determined the design for the alfombra. Templates were cut from corrugated cardboard and sawdust was dyed with a lanolin dye. The building process began at 10:00am on Saturday morning. There were many volunteers who helped throughout the day. We finished the alfombra at 5:00pm that afternoon. Whew! I have memories of the first year that we worked until 3:00am the next morning. And with just a couple hours sleep, Easter morning came pretty early. After construction was completed, we covered it with tarps to protect it so we could share it on Easter morning.

It is believed that the tradition of making alfombras arrived in Guatemala from Spain and the Canary Islands. However, there is also the belief that the pre-colonial Maya made carpets out of pine needles, fruits and flowers. The word for carpet in Spanish is alfombra, a word of Arabic origin.

Vickie Hepler has been involved with the Sister Parish group since its inception in 1993 and traveled with the first delegation to visit TNII in the spring of 95. She joined the SJA choir in 98 and has enjoyed two years of bringing song and music to her heart. Vickie also cherishes her involvement in a SCC that's about four years old.

View Previous Alfombras Last Year's Alfombra 1999's Alfombra Alfombra 98 with Delegates