Carnaval!

I am sitting here in my room on a rainy afternoon with pink and black powder in my hair and wet clothes on the floor, curled up under the covers. I just ate like 5 pieces of delicious Ecuadorian chocolate; I may have developed an addiction. I am burning some coffee-scented incense that I picked up at a store in Riobamba that sells the most flavors of incense I have ever seen in my life.
Well now that you have a mental picture of my life at this moment, you may be asking why do I have pink and black powder in my hair? Carnaval has arrived here in Ecuador. Since last Monday kids have been throwing water balloons at each other, and sometimes at me, and on Friday the real dirty stuff started when people bought aerosol cans of spray foam and little bags of colorful powder. The foam works great to spray really far, but at $2 a can it’s pretty expensive and doesn’t last long (but yet people still buy it instead of giving fruit and veggies to their kids…). The powder works best when the person’s face is already wet and then you go throw it right in their face. I have been doing my fair share of participating as well in the carnaval activities. Thursday I went to the house of my host cousins who live a little more out in the country on the main highway. That is the big market day in the nearby town of Guamote, so in the afternoon there were lots of pick-up trucks coming back with tons of people sitting in the back, so we just sat and waited for them and then threw buckets of water at them as they passed by. We also ended up throwing water on each other, so then we laid down in the middle of the highway to warm up from the asphalt. Luckily it has been sunny this week, so it’s not that bad when you get wet and it actually kind of feels good. Friday there was a program in the plaza and groups of kids from all the schools in the area sang typical carnaval songs. Some boys dressed up like girls, and they all had on their best clothes even though they knew they were going to get dirty. I was just standing there with Rachel (another PCV) watching the performances when some kids started throwing water balloons at us, and from that moment on it was war. Rachel and I each bought a can of spray foam, but then in a few minutes we were left defenseless so we bought a bag of powder and some water balloons. We sat with some neighbor kids filling up some water balloons, and then a group of high school boys came walking around the corner – they were our enemies. I walked closer to them to throw our balloons, but then they stole the whole bag of balloons from me and threw them all at me instead. Rachel and I went up to her roof which overlooks one of the main streets in Cebadas and threw buckets of water on people walking past down below so we got them back, kindof. Later Friday afternoon I went back to the community where my host cousins and the grandparents live and watched them kill a pig. They stabbed it right in the heart because that is how it dies fastest. They laid it on some logs and used small branches to burn off the hair and toast it up a little bit, then washed it off and peeled off the skin to eat which they love (they always give me the biggest piece, but I don’t really like it as much as they do). Then we cut it down the middle to remove the organs, and hung up the pig on a rope from the roof of the house. I was helping the two aunts clean out the intestines, while an uncle and the grandpa were cutting off the fat to be melted down. Other family members were helping with other jobs preparing the food while the kids were running around spraying each other with foam. Later I helped make sausage, stuffing the intestines with a rice and cabbage mixture. Finally we ate some fried fat with corn, and a soup with the sausage, and meat from the heart, lungs, and liver and the extra intestines we didn’t use for sausage. We all split some big pieces of grilled meat which was the best part for me. The soup was actually probably one of the grossest things I have eaten here so far, but they served me first and we were sitting in the kitchen with about 15 people (and there’s only probably 10 bowls and spoons) so I had to eat it all because they were pretty much all just watching me. Pretty much all day all the adults were just speaking in Kichwa so I just sat there quietly not participating in the conversation, but it was still really nice that they shared their family tradition with me. I also really like hanging out with the kids, especially these twin girls who are 5 – they always comment on how white my skin is and tell me that my hair looks like doll’s hair. Saturday I went to Riobamba to meet up with my counterpart Dr. Silva who now works in the city, and we randomly were in a parade which he knew about before but didn’t tell me. There was a group of a few midwives, a truck decorated with medicinal plants and balloons that had speakers playing an announcement they had recorded about preventing maternal death, and then the employees from one of the health centers dressed in traditional outfits dancing. I was just wearing my regular clothes and was originally in charge of the camcorder. It was kind of pointless to record the whole parade because it was just the same thing over and over for a few miles, and because it started to get real messy when random people would just throw water or spray foam at me. Everyone always seems to want to get the gringa more than everyone else. But this time I was prepared with my own can of spray and would get everyone who sprayed me first. We also handed out some flyers encouraging people to give birth in the hospital, or at least to have a car ready to go and an emergency plan. Saturday night there was supposed to be stuff going on in Cebadas, but I was walking around about 9:30 and didn’t really see anything, but I think there was a beauty pageant that started later, but you had to pay to get in so I wasn’t really planning on going anyways. Sunday was the biggest day in Cebadas for carnaval activities. First starting around 10 there was a parade, with a band and different groups of people, mostly students, each doing a different typical dance behind a truck with speakers. I ate lunch with one of the nurses in the Subcentro, and hung out there for a little bit, but there weren’t many patients. I went walking around the plaza a little to say hi to people and came back to the Subcentro soaking wet and covered in foam and powder, then it started to rain and was really cold. I went to change my clothes and by then it had stopped raining and we went to watch “the bulls”. There was this little stadium made of wooden planks and tons of people sitting wherever they could find room, including on top of the busses parked nearby. A fair amount of men from the community were waiting inside the bull ring for when they let them out and they acted like matadors with their red wool ponchos. Most are young men, some in high school, but they’re pretty agile and its actually kind of fun to watch them. Some are drunk, and that number increases as the hours go on, but surprisingly not too many people get hurt. I have heard of people dying, but only one guy that I saw got seriously injured from the bull. There were a lot more injuries when 2 sets of the wooden bleachers collapsed with people on top of them and standing below too. An old man broke his arm and I splinted it because the doctor was just gonna leave it, and we called the ambulance for him. After that happened, people started leaving because I think they were afraid of standing on the bleachers. A while after the bulls were over everyone met up again in the plaza to wait for the musical performers who were coming. By this time there were a lot of drunk people, mostly middle aged and older men, and they just had a great time dancing to the music they were just playing on the speakers before the artists came out. I ended up dancing with my host dad’s brothers and the cousins and everybody – I was the only girl in our little group, but I had fun. This one cousin was opening beer bottles with his teeth which I thought was pretty impressive, then he poured it into cups to share with everyone. I left at 11 to go shower to get all the powder out of my hair, and went to bed, but at that point only one of the groups had sung so I think it went on at least till 2 in the morning.
As far as work goes, lately I’ve been just being a nurse pretty much, helping look for patient files, weighing and measuring kids, taking blood pressures – but the other day I talked to the doctor and now he understands that that’s not what I’m here to do. There is also a high school kid that just started an internship at the Subcentro so he does pretty much the same thing I do, but I can leave whenever I want to do other things and he has to stay as long as the doctor does till about 3 in the afternoon. So for my other activities, we had the second meeting of the youth group I’m helping run with World Vision – it was a workshop on leadership skills. They hired this man whose a lawyer to give the workshop, and I think it was kind of ineffective because he just talked to them pretty much, and when he did put them in smaller groups they hardly talked at all. Next time we’re going to do public speaking activities, and I hope that they will let me actually run it, with the help of the World Vision staff. I want to do some improv acting type of activities, and I will save them money because I’ll do it for free. I also am still trying to get organized all the stuff for the medicinal plants project. My counterpart has kind of taken over which is good, but at the same time not because it leaves me with nothing to do. Hopefully within the next month or so we will get all the plants to the community leaders or midwives and do some sort of workshop on the uses, and then it will my job to go around to all the communities seeing if they are actually using the plants or not. I have also been coordinating with other volunteer organizations, and for a week in February I went to another little community in Chimborazo with a group called Builders Beyond Borders. They are a group of high school students from Connecticut who were building some toilets and some other small construction projects around the school and community meeting room. I helped translate and did some of the construction work too, and spent lots of time just helping organize meals and helping figuring out other details too. There was another volunteer organization called New Horizons based out of Quito that provided the building materials (so BBB just had to provide the labor and their food and lodging). There was another American volunteer with New Horizons helping out that was actually from Colorado too so we helped each other stay sane that week that we were treated like slaves. It wasn’t actually that bad though and was interesting to get to see how other NGO’s work in the communities. Maybe I inspired some of the kids to join the Peace Corps someday, although they were talking about what food they missed the most and I had to remind them they had been here 6 days and I have been here 8 months, so I don’t know if most of them could make it. At least they got a glimpse of how people live in other countries. One of the things they were most surprised about was the lack of meat in the diet – they were always asking for more, and also the lack of showering, but when its cold out and you don’t have a hot shower you’re not gonna shower. Planning on meeting up with more Americans when the first group of MedLife volunteers comes at the end of March. The director came to Cebadas to meet with the director of the Subcentro to try to coordinate, and he kind of made it difficult for them, but we are going to bring vaccines to add to the services MedLife will offer. They have more volunteer groups coming from May to September during summer vacation for the college students, so hopefully in April they will meet again to plan better for the other brigades.
Although sometimes I feel like I am not really making an impact here and usually don’t have enough work to keep me busy, I really love it here and the whole situation really. I doubt there will be another period in my life when I can just do whatever I want pretty much every day, living in a beautiful mountain town with a really relaxed culture. I have been reading lots of books, watching movies I buy at stores in Riobamba for $1, and listening to some of the 17000 songs I have accumulated from other volunteers. I love having a (semi)real job during the week, and being able to be a tourist when I want to in a beautiful diverse country. I love it when little kids call me by my name even though I don’t recognize them at all, just because my town is so small that everyone knows who the gringa is. Although I wish I had more friends my age (there aren’t many here because they leave to go to college or get jobs), I love talking to little kids and old ladies who I walk past every day to go to work. When I had my birthday here last month it was weird to think about the fact that I’ll have another birthday here, but I have made it this far so I can’t see myself going home early – why would I want to get back to a stressful environment where I would also have nothing to do?