Celebrating SAMHUINN WITH THE SUDANESE

Enough already with the doom and gloom! Samhuinn is upon us! This year, I helped Africans and Guatemalans celebrate our ancient European end-of-summer festival.

On Saturday, up north near Lewiston, the Maine Immigrant Farmers held their annual harvest Festival. Since we were having a Nor’easter, the entire event moved into two tiny rooms of an old Maine barn (see pic above). All summer, immigrants from the Sudan and Guatemala had sweated to grow gorgeous pumpkins, squash, and a zillion other veggies with land, seeds, tools, and expertise granted by various funding agencies. Now they had a chance to show them all off – and cook ‘em up and feed all of us who came.

Inside, the barn groaned with people. To move from point A to point B, one inched one’s way sideways at the pace of a car in a stalled line on the highway. Against one old plank wall on a table sat piles of pumpkins and white squash. With their dark skin, the Sudanese were hard to see in the dark barn. Luckily, the women were all bedecked in bright red, yellow, green and blue head coverings and long dresses (all under no-color Maine parkas).

Organized by a twenty-something mother and fulltime student, the festival left a bit to be desired. Heat for one. Light for another. Not to mention a distinct lack, for the first hour or so, of those quintessential essentials: porta-potties.

Little children carved pumpkins and milled around at waist level. Decorated with glittered faces striped with cat’s whiskers and other décor, they’d come up and tap me for help getting caps off magic markers and glue out of glue sticks.

Outside, the wind howled and the rain beat at the old barn planks. It took no time for my feet to become blocks of ice. For a while I stood next to a hot-coals-containing stove the Guatemalans were cooking on, just to get warm. The barn was so dark I could barely see to dish the food onto my paper plate. Then there was the problem of moving sideways at a snail’s pace, balancing a plate of food, to find a place to sit. All the work paid off handsomely, however; the food was to die for (I saw very little of it, but it certainly tasted good).

Happy Samhuinn, everybody!