THE ETHNOGRAPHIC TOUR OF THE VILLAGE

On one of our days in the village, we did an ethnographic tour of the village. This involved splitting into four groups and visiting four different parts of the village where the people used to work, live, and relax.

• The first site was the school. It was a single small room connected to the teacher´s house. We learned that the children wrote on pieces of slate like a chalkboard, and that they studied geometric shapes, gegography, mathematics, and more. 

                                     

• The second site was the blacksmith´s shop. This was a small building with a large forge and many examples of tools the blacksmith used and made. The village blacksmith was an important person who didn´t do the same type of work as everyone else, like farming. Whatever he needed was provided for him by the villagers. We also learned that the forge was one of the main places that the men of the village gathered to socialize.

                                      

• The third place was the washing site, where the women would go to wash everything. This place consisted of a three-walled structure with two pools, one for washing andone for rinsing. The pools were connected by a small opening, and a current ran through such that the dirty water wouldn´t flow into the other pool. There the women would socialize. 

                                       

• The last site was the museum house. This house was well preserved from the days that people inhabited the village, and it retained (more or less) its original structure. We saw the first floor, where the animals lived in the winter, as well as the upstairs, where the people lived. There was a kitchen with a large clay oven, a pantry/cold room to store food, two small bedrooms, and a large attic-like place to store things. In many of the rooms, examples of original tools and items the people used were humg on the walls and displayed on the floor.
  
  
  
                              

WORKSHOPS

The workshops were less work, more play. The workshops were offered three of the five (full) days we spnt in Umbralejo. There was a wide range, including natural cosmetics, beekeeping, massages, fractals, astronomy, knitting, basket weaving, traditional cooking, decoration with natural materials (flowers, etc.), orientation and senses in the woods, and ecological carpentry.
                                   
                                     

• Natural cosmetics involved the creation of products like bath salts, deodorant, and lip balm from natural ingredients like wax and essential oils.
• Beekeeping eas taking care of bees; the participants put on the safety gear and opened the hives.

      

• In the massages workshop, students learned some massaging techniques.
• The fractal workshops was about the natural and mathematic phenomeon of the same name. In astronomy, there was a presentation about the stars and constellations.
• In knitting, students learned about yarn and some basic stitches. Many students left with a small piece of cloth that they had knitted.
• Basket weaving was making baskets from natural materials with traditional tecniques.

                                     

• In traditional cooking, the students made rosquillas, which we later ate for la merienda (they were delicious).

                                       

• In the decoration class, the students made art with things they found outside.
• In ecological carpentry, participants used wood to make birdhouses, benches, doghouses, and animal pens. Ther creations remain in Umbralejo to be used by the program.

                                       

    

• For orientation and sensations in the woods, participants went to the woods with their eyes covered and had to trust that others would lead them well. They also had to identify substances (leaves, mushrooms) without the advantage of sight.
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STORY-TELLING NIGHT

There was also one night of story-telling. One of the program workers told a story from the village, then the students could tell others that they knew.

• Feliciano Ablanedo's story, local legend, went like this:
                                                                                                                                                      This is a real story about a man who lived in Umbralejo 50 years ago. He died in 1943 or 1944. This man, Feliciano Ablanedo was native from an Asturian village. He emigrated to Umbralejo with his sister and his mother, who died after a while. Nobody knew why he chose a village hidden in a pine forest in the mountain range of Ayllón. This was strange.
  Feliciano was a rich man. He was the richest man in the village and he had the biggest and the most luxurious house.
  
  He met a woman when he was 45 years and the woman was 30. For the time, those were very late ages for marriage, but the priest married them.
  
  On the wedding day, Feliciano died of pneumonia. However, the wedding was celebrated because three witnesses, who  were family of the bride, signed for  it,despite Feliciano´s unexpected illness and death,  the bride could marry with the deceased person (this happens in weddings by proxy).
  
  The strangest is that Feliciano left  all his fortune to his wife and after the wedding she left the village  unexpectedly. Since then,  it is said that Feliciano  has been spotted roam ing around the village.
  
  He isn’t an evil ghost; he only enjoys  turning on and turning  off  the lights and opening and closing the  doors.
  
  About Feliciano’s wife  who  was called Carmela, no papers about her family and her surname were found in the official files of the village.
  
  Many questions are still unsolved: Why  did Feliciano leave  all his fortune to his wife before passing away? Why  did Carmela leave  the village after Feliciano´s burial ? Who were exactly the three witnesses who, despite  Feliciano´s death, signed for the bride? . And finally, what happened to Feliciano´s sister and Carmela´s sister-in-law?. Her  strange disappearance a few days after the wedding and burial  remains unsolved, as well.
  

• Jordan's story, went like this: 

           In some parts of Alaska you can still see remnants of the days when the land was owned by Russia,   such as old churches and graveyards. In one such place a company wanted to construct some new buildings in the town center, and to do so they wanted to buy the old church so that they could demolish it. The church was sold, but on the condition that the graves from the old cementery must be moved to a new location. the company agreed, the church was sold, and workers began moving the old headstones. This was an interesting town because it had a long history of ghosts. Sometimes, in the old districts of town, people would see two blurry white figures fighting; one always had a knife.
             After a short time, people began going missing. Their cars were still at their homes, their clothes in their closets. They were all men, and they all disappeared in the same old area of town. One night a teenager was driving in that same area when she saw a woman standing on the side of the road dressed all in white, with a knife in her hand. However, when she got closer, the woman had disappeared.
              The people of the town began to panic and gossip. Everyone was discussing the disappearances, since there was not much crime in the village. One day, in a café, an old man heard part of a conversation and recalled another series of crimes that had occurred when he was a small child. The townspeople looked in the old records and found the story. Many decades earlier, a miner had gone mad and murdered his children. When his wife came home and saw what he had done, she grabbed a knife and stabbed him to death. Then, out of grief, she turned the knife on herself. It was the worst crime that had ever happened in the town.
                Also in the records, the people read that the family had been buried in the old cementery, the same one currently being moved to a different location. The mayor decided to stop the project and ordered that graves be returned to their original locations and the headstones replaced. Once this was done, the disappearances stopped. A few weeks later, another person saw the two white figures fighting on the road again.
                   In the end, the theory was that the ghost of the woman had continued to get revenge on her husband in death, by killing him over and over. When his grave was moved, she couldn't find him, and so began killing other men in his place. When his  grave was replaced, she could once again find his ghost and begin the cycle again.
                                                                                                                                                

María Cabrerizo Gil.

Miriam Carmena del Viso.

                                                                                                                                               

MEETING EACH OTHER

There were also large group activities to help the students get to know each other. These mostly consisted of games which took place ofter dinner. An example was a game set un like speed dating, where the students spoke to each other for a minute or two. Another involved each students saying their name and an animal that begins with the same letter, to help the others remember better.

OUR DAY OUT TO LA HUERCE

One day was very different from the others. On this day we walked to a nearby village called La Huerce. This was a small village with few habitants. Along the way we saw the old mills, some places where animals were housed (las tanias), and a lot of beautiful scenery. We stopped once to eat bread and chocolate, and once we arrivedto the village, we had lunch in the bar. The walk to the village was rather long, but the walk back was very short. We got lucky with the weather, since it didn´t rain while we were walking.

THE SCHOOL PROJECT

Another activity in Umbralejo was the school project. We worked on it for 1.5-2 hours every dday but Wednesday. The English part of project involved a number of activities related to climate change and recycling. Many of these activities consisted of a chort article followed by some questions. Titles inclued "The Environment", "The USA Goes Green", "Population Distribution", "Towns and Villages", "Recycling", "Our Changing Landscape" and "Alternative Forms of Energy". These subjects were relevant because many of the activities in Umbralejo involved concepts of nature and environmentalism.

TAJOS

Our time in Umbralejo was full of a variety of activities, from gathering firewood to taking care of bees. These activities were divided into jobs (tajos) and workshops (talleres). There were four jobs, and the students were divided into four work groups. Each group was a mix of students from Monreal and Talavera, and each group had a turn at each different job. These jobs were gathering firewood and ntending to the gardens, cleaning, bricklaying, and taking care of the many animal that live in the village. The garden and firewood group trimmed bushes and trees, collected wood, and transplanted some plants. The cleaning group swept and mopped the residences of the students and teachers. The bricklayers fixed loose stones and filled holes in the streets of Umbralejo. Finally, the animal workers cleaned the cages of the chickens, geese, and rabbits, and gave the donkey a haircut.