This festival was unlike anything I had experienced before.
First off, it had aspects I had never experienced: like traditional dance and
singing competitions, a competition to elect the community’s 18 year old Queen
for the year (pageants are extremely popular in Latin America), booths selling
fruits and vegetables, handicrafts, and the traditional meal of tilapia cooked
in a palm leaf (maito) and yucca, and most notably, the amount of drinking was
absurd. Almost every booth and store had stacks of beer crates, and this ran
out two days in, and more had to be trucked in. Almost everyone I saw was
drinking, either beer, aguadente (sugarcane alcohol, which is very strong), or
chicha, the traditional drink made by women to give energy to their working
husbands, but also has a quantity of alcohol in it from the yucca fermented by
the women’s spit. I pretended to drink the chicha, as it can make you extremely
ill if not made from clean water, and I refused as much alcohol as I politely
could, but still managed to be drunk by 3pm on Saturday. Luckily, I left on
Sunday to go back to Quito, or else it would for sure be another day of endless
drinking, ending in crazy dancing. From what I hear, everyone had Monday off as
a day where you could be completely and utterly hungover without guilt, which
I’m sure most people took advantage of.
This festival was quite intriguing, as it was an opportunity
for everyone to get together and celebrate. However, many people did not join
in, including my host-family, other than my host-mother who was helping to
organize it. They barely attended any of the events, and at one point, Nina
(the eldest) grimaced when I suggested she come with me to the election of the
Queen.
Another intriguing thing was the drinking. Although drinking
is commonplace in my community in the afternoons, and especially on the
weekend, this was an amount above anything I had ever seen before. It reminded
me of Frosh Week/Orientation Week at University where most students took the
opportunity to get extremely drunk. The main difference was that it was not
just 18-24 year olds getting drunk, but their parents and grandparents. It was
rather amusing during the day, but in the evening, it became shocking and
alarming. The next thing that was brought to my mind was the stereotype of
Indigenous people as drunkards. I am only familiar with this stereotype in
Canada, but unfortunately, I don’t think that there is a boundary at the
continental barrier. I have come to believe that the drinking problems
associated with indigenous people spans across the Americas, which no doubt is
a reaction to colonialism, whether it was by the English, the French, the
Spanish or the Portuguese. This was a sad realization for me on one of the
darker realities of my community. I also think that my community isn’t that bad
either, because most people have a sense of purpose in the community given to
them by their intense organization to which they were celebrating that weekend.
On a lighter note, being around so many happy and welcoming
people really made me feel like this was my community for the first time. I
felt like I was a part of it, or as close as I could be given that I am still
very noticeably a foreigner. I was introduced to many people through the other
three volunteers, and through other community members I had met before through
my host-family. There was even one man who has tried twice to set me up with
his 23 year old son who works in the military on the Amazonian Columbian
border, who I have also avoided meeting both times on account of me leaving to
go to Quito for classes.
The festival was definitely a good time and it has
definitely given me an opportunity to get to know my community a little bit
more.
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