Las Fiestas

For a town of only 200 people, Buenos Aires knows how to party.  Two weekends ago, we had the yearly festivals of Buenos Aires and they really did live up to all the hype they got in the preceding weeks.  At 4 am on Friday morning, I awoke to a band parading through the streets of BA, led by a man setting off bottle rockets.  The theory behind this was for everyone to wake up happy on the first day of fiestas.  Well, waking to a band playing outside my front door at 4 am isn’t quite the happy start to the fiestas that I would have chosen, but maybe I am just not a morning person (fact).  Later Friday morning the elementary school kids had a program.  Some of them recited poetry, others sang, and some preformed dances.  The whole thing was super cute, except for the fact that they kept playing some weird Cumandá propaganda music during the breaks.  It is creepy how much of an influence the mayor and Cumandá have on BA.  That afternoon there were ‘indoor’ soccer games for men and women.  I wasn’t invited to play on the BA women’s team…I am just not up to par with them.  That night was the Reina competition.  This is a big deal in Ecuador and almost every fiesta or event has a Reina competition which is basically like a beauty pageant.  However, I guess there was not that much interest among the girls of Buenos Aires to compete so they just picked the Reina before the night even began.  Thus, the ‘competition’ simply consisted of the four girls being escorted on stage by their dates, then strutting in a circle to show off their dresses, and then the old Reina crowning the new Reina.  Once that was over, there were a few different acts.  A man from Cumandá sang and played the guitar, there was a Michael Jackson impersonator (super good dancer for what appeared to be a 10 year old), a lady who sang, and then there was a comedy group.  The comedians were great and they got a lot of the kids involved which was fun.  They even poked fun at the creepy guy in town that I can’t stand…awesome.  I left around 12:30 at night, but the DJ played all night until the band started up again around 4:30-5ish in the morning. 

The second day of the fiestas was definitely the best.  During the day there was a soccer tournament.  There also was a parade with a band, horses, and some creepy dancers.  I actually happened to be in Cumandá while the parade was getting ready to head into BA.  It was pretty funny to see a whole brass band (10+ people) packed in the back of a pickup truck, playing music as they drove down the road to BA.  Packed in the back of another truck were all of the dancers wearing some strange masks.  When I got back to BA all of the parade members had disembarked from the trucks and were parading around the town into the church with some saint figurine leading the way.  The masked people stopped outside of the church and danced for a while.  Someone told me they were supposed to depict demons…not really sure why. 

After a costume change the dancers emerged again in what can only be described as KKK outfits, however the hoods that they wore were colorful rather than white.  Every person had a white robe and a different colored hood/pointy hat/mask/whatever you call it.  They danced in a circle for a while and then the mass in the church started.  It was all kind of creepy so I went back to watching soccer.  Once the soccer tournament was over the crowds all went over to the bull arena.  The bullfighting was priceless.  First off, to watch, a ridiculous amount of people perched themselves precariously in the stands made from caña.  The particular beam I was sitting on with my old host-family and others was at least 10 ten off the ground and severely bowed in the middle from the amount of weight being placed on it.  At one point during the day a caña beam full of people actually snapped clear in half and people tumbled to the ground.  My host brother said he saw a baby fly up in the air and then land on the ground.  Not sure if that is actually true, but I guess everybody was ok.  Anyways, let me try and describe the ‘bullfighting’ event that I witnessed on both Saturday and Sunday of the fiestas.  To begin the fight the Reina and her court all rode horses into the arena and paraded around a bit.  The Reina was super scared of the horse she was on and that actually caused the horse to kick her off in the middle of the little parade thing…whoops.  After that little incident they brought in the bulls.  The bulls hey used were actually quite small; youngins that were still growing.  They only let in one bull at a time but they must have had at least 6 or 7 that they rotated between.  The bull would come out of the truck and anyone who wanted could climb into the arena to ‘fight’.  This basically meant that a ton of drunken men would hang off the caña into the arena and yell at the bull, but as soon as it came anywhere close to them they would haul themselves back up into the stands.  So, when the bull decided to run in a circle around the arena it looked like a strange version of the ‘wave’ as people frantically hoisted themselves up into the stands.  The really drunk men or the somewhat experienced bull fighters would actually stand in the middle of the arena with one of those red cape things to fight the bull.  Well there was only one guy who clearly knew what he was doing and was able to ‘fight’ the bull without getting hurt.  The other men were not so lucky.  One drunk was trying to run away from the bull and ended up get trapped up against the wall and beaten for a while until he was able to roll on the ground under the beams out of the arena.  He stayed on the ground and passed out in that same spot for the remainder of the bull fight (at least a couple of hours).  At one point a bull actually rammed its way through the caña and starting running away through the streets of BA.  All the people outside of the arena who weren’t ‘safely’ up in the stands started frantically running away and a group of men started chasing the bull.  Eventually they caught the bull behind the school and it took a large number of men to drag it back to the arena.  There were also some professional clowns that came in to mess with the bulls.  The highlight was this ‘T’ see-saw thing that two of the clowns would hang on.  When the bull charged to one end the guy would jump off the ground and hang just above the bulls head until the bull decided to charge to the other end where the other clown was now on the ground.  After the clowns left one particular man decided he wanted to use this contraption too; basically, he would just scurry up the pole and hang there, while the bull rammed the pole trying to knock him off.  This particular man was also the same one that ended the bull fighting festivities for the day.  He ended up getting trapped against the wall and the bull rammed him and impaled him right about the heart.  Everybody started screaming and the announcer guy started yelling for the ambulance.  Well, of course there should have been an ambulance, but this is BA, so of course there was not one.  So as people are yelling for an ambulance, hoards of people are leaving the stands to go crowd around this guy and gawk.  Eventually a group of men carry the man over to a truck, throw him in the bed, and they speed away to the little health center in Cumandá.  People were telling me that he had a huge hole in his chest, and that it was so deep that they could see his heart beating.  It turned out he was ok, and had to get 4 stitches on the inside and 8 on the outside.  He was back at the fiestas later that night drinking some more.  (He actually continued to drink all weekend until Sunday night when he told me his wound hurt badly, so he was going to drive his motorcycle home.  I took his keys away and let him pass out in the middle of town instead.)       

All the Bull Fighters

Dragging the Escaped Bull Back to the Arena

The See Saw

The Guy who was Hurt Later using the See Saw

After everyone dispersed from the bull fighting, people went home to get ready for the grand ball and the fireworks.  I was about to leave my house when a huge group of kids came running to the side of my house to put out a fire.  They were setting off paper globe/hot air balloon things in the park, and one happened to catch fire and land in my yard.  Once we took care of that, I went to watch the firework display.  Ecuador has this thing called the Vaca Loca (translates to Crazy Cow).  It is like a saddle thing that a person puts on their back that shoots out fireworks.  So the man is running around with this contraption on his back while fireworks are being shot out all around him…quite entertaining and quite dangerous.  After a few people participated in that, they set off the Castillo.  It was this large tower of fireworks that was pretty awesome to watch.  And of course there was no caution tape of anything of the sort, so I watched with my neighbors right next to the thing with the sparks showering down all around us.  There were a few actual fireworks in the sky too and that was the firework display.

Afterwards the ban came on.  They were great; it was a really lively brass band from some other province in Ecuador.  They even had a couple of go-go dancers to keep the drunken men entertained.  It was super fun because this was the first time I actually hung out with kids my own age and it wasn’t awkward.  Of course I still hung out with the old men like I always do, but it was also nice to be able to meet some new friends that aren’t either over the age of 50 or under the age of 16.  I got home late, but the music was still going when I woke up around 8.  Sunday was a low key day since most everyone in town was either still drunk or really hung over.  The motocross race was supposed to start around 10 but since nobody was awake until later, it started around 1 instead.  Everybody was allowed to race, there were some older men and there was also a 10 year old boy that was able to hold his own with the older guys.  After the race was the second day of bull fighting.  This day was actually pretty boring because there weren’t that many men that were gutsy enough to actually fight with the bulls, but this was the day I had to give away my colcha.  It was the last prize of the day, so it was a little tough to get men out there since everybody was ready to go home.  But with a little persuasion by the announcer a group of guys went out there to compete for the colcha.  A guy ended up getting pinned up against the beams by the bull and got his pants ripped down the back.  So once he was awarded the colcha, (I chickened out of actually giving it away) he wore it around like a skirt to cover up the large hole in the back of his pants.  As everyone was leaving I was going to go out into the arena to take a picture of the guy with the colcha but he started violently vomiting in the middle of the arena so I decided to forgo the picture and let him be.  Later that night there was another dance with a DJ but since it was a Sunday night there weren’t all that many people there, only the die-hards, like my Leonor and Jefferson.  

Vito with the Colcha

Early Monday morning after the fiestas I got on a bus to head to Tumbaco for our Reconnect workshop.  I have been in site about 4.5 months, so PC has what they call Reconnect where everybody gets together for a week, we present on our projects from our communities and we have some training/workshops.  I had to bring a community representative with me as well.  Jefferson made up a bunch of excuses why he couldn’t go so I ended up bringing another guy in town named Jaime.  We presented on BA and got some good advice from PC and that was that.  It was great to see all my fellow volunteers again and to share stories and to hear that it sounds like everybody is going through a lot of the same struggles.  I got to stay with my old host family which was super nice…Julian is getting so big and is talking now!  After Reconnect I went to Quito to hang out for the weekend.  I ate some great Thai food, went to a soccer game at the US Embassy, went for a nice long run at altitude through the streets of Quito, went to a potluck and played some touch football, and had an amazing tailgate with awesome food at the PCVLs apartment where we were able to watch the Michigan/Notre Dame game (no Iowa, bummer) through the wonders of the internet (and something called a sling box?).  I decided I did not want to head back to site yet, so I went and visited another volunteer’s site on Sunday afternoon, and then headed to Riobamba on Monday.  Tuesday morning I decided I couldn’t procrastinate any longer so I hopped on a bus back to the good ole BA.

It was nice coming back because everyone expressed how it was different not running into me for a whole week and that they missed me...aww.  Since I have been back I have gone to a meeting with APROCAI and realized that they have some major issues that need to be worked through so I will be helping them come up with a large cost-benefit analysis to basically show them that they aren’t going to make any money anytime soon.  The problem with all of these cacao organizations is that they get some money from the government and they build a facility and want to start buying/processing cacao without doing any sort of calculations.  No studies whatsoever were done so now they have this deal/contract with the government that they are going to process cacao.  However, with the tools they have right now, they are not going to be profitable.  Other than that, I am making recycled stuff with the kids in the school, baking/cooking with people in town, and working on the family gardens.  Still no word from the municipality about the sewage plans since Jefferson decided to make them sign a contract with me.              

Random Thoughts:

·         I swam in the dirty Chimbo River with my neighbor kids one day.  We found a natural pool area where there aren’t many rapids.  It was super fun and I surprisingly came back free of skin fungi.

·         I still get tons of food brought to me.  And sometimes they even watch me to make sure that I eat it all. 

·         I went fishing with Pepito one afternoon, we ended up catching four pretty good sized fish and they were actually pretty tasty, although it probably isn’t the safest to eat fish that grow up in super polluted water.  Pero no pasa nada.

·         I have all kinds of things growing in my backyard including oritos, mandarin oranges, lemons, quinces, ají peppers, and cacao.  And soon I will have lots of veggies.

·         When I was gone my neighbors took care of Milly for me.  I came back to lots of stories about how he spilled soup, climbed up mosquito nets, harassed the puppies and chickens, and countless other things…whoops.

·         My neighbors watered my garden for me while I was gone and I didn’t even ask them to.  And Luis came to my house one night with a machete because he thought he heard someone trying to break in.  I really got lucky with such good neighbors.

·         I have gotten used to the two piles of bat poop that I have to sweep up every morning.

·         I was leaving the school one day when a group of chickens got smashed by truck.  Leonor was watching and made me bring her the dead chickens.  She started to pluck the mutilated things and said she would cook them for dinner.

·         A meteorite hit near Bucay a couple weeks ago.  Everybody in town is talking about how it’s the sign for the beginning of the end.

·         An evangelical ‘brother’ came to my house one day to preach to me.

·         I woke up one morning to two rat heads and two sets of hind legs and tail on my bedroom floor.  I guess Milly is a good hunter, but only likes the top half of the animals.