On a nice, sunny, 80 degree Sunday Vanessa and I headed back to the Banado to help out with the organization’s small festival for their patron saint, San Juan (their fiestas patronales, if you will). The branch of the organization who works with mothers who are going back to school was putting on the festival, which involved selling lots of typical Paraguayan foods (yucca empanadas, a cheesy/yucca floury type thing, arroz con leche, and a couple other fried things) as well as selling kids tickets to play games which might win them a prize, and burning life sized dolls at the end. It was fun to help out at the festival and interact a bit with the mothers and their kids. The week before, the branch of the organization which works with adolescents also held a festival, and we helped out there which was fun; usually at these festivals they make a “disco” for the kids and charge to enter. Watching the little 7th and 8th graders at the disco was hilarious, and reminded us of 6th grade dances where all the boys were on one side, the girls on the other, and a couple daring couples in the middle grinding on each other.
The festival at the mothers’ center was different of course. It was mainly filled with little kids and their mothers hanging out and playing games. Towards the end of the night, as per tradition, the organizers brought out two large stuffed dolls. These dolls were meant to be burned, and are usually representing people that the group isn’t very fond of. Well in this case the two dolls were the new president and a lawyer who was involved in the impeachment trial a couple weeks ago. A few teenagers took care of propping them up together and used some cooking oil to help the fire on them spread. Definitely a thrill watching things burn!
At the end of the night most of the moms and kids went home, but a few mothers and some teenagers stuck around and they tried to open up the disco. Unfortunately, not enough people were interested in dancing to really charge to enter. One of the staff at the organization was trying to get people to dance, and given my time in the DR, I jumped in and danced with a couple little kids. We tried to get other people dance too, but once again I was reminded that we were not in the DR, and we couldn’t get anyone to dance for very long. I enjoyed myself nonetheless.
On Wednesday I celebrated our day of independence by attending an “asado” (basically, a barbeque), for my host sister who was turning 22. Because she had to take a test at her university first, the meat didn’t go onto the grill until 9:00 pm, but I didn’t care; I always love watching people put huge chunks of meat on the grill! As we were waiting we all shared some wine, but in a different way than normally at parties, where everyone has their own glass.
Let me give a little background: in Paraguay it is common to drink “terere” which is a cold version of the tea “mate”. You drink both teas through a straw stuck in a small cup. The leaves are already in the cup, and someone will pour hot or cold water into the cup, drink it up, pour more water in and pass it to the next person to drink. It’s common to share between several people, pouring, drinking, and passing for a while until the water in the thermos is gone. Apparently, the tradition doesn’t stop with tea. I had been warned that in Paraguay wine is often mixed with Coke, but when they began to drink wine I was surprised to see that they drink it in a similar way to mate and terere. My host mom filled up a thermos with wine, coke and ice and would pour some into a huge wine glass, filling it maybe a third of the way. She drank maybe one or two sips, then handed it to me. I wasn’t sure how much I was supposed to drink, but soon saw that basically, we were supposed to drink a bit and pass it to the next person, re filling the glass when necessary. Here’s a picture of my host mom, her sister and I; in the corner you can see the huge thermos (which is filled with wine) and the wine glass.
This continued in several different circles the entire night. I enjoyed this kind of communal drinking, despite the fact that my host mom now has a really awful cold and I’d be surprised if I didn’t get it, considering how many times we passed that glass back and forth!
Dinner, which we had around 10:30, was sausage, pieces of the rib, yucca and a cold rice salad, it was great! We then all slowly started going to bed, since my host sister usually wakes up at 4:00 to go to work and the rest of the family starts rising around 5:00. The following two days made it hard to wake up though because it got colder and started to rain off and on. The Banado has streets made of dirt and stones, so when it rains things get really muddy. On top of the cold, the rain makes it a whole lot less likely that people will leave their houses. This is unfortunate for me since I’m at stage in my project where I’m beginning to teach the workshops I hope to evaluate, but in order to really understand what people think of them, they need to actually attend! Of course, when it’s 55 degrees and raining, I don’t want to go walking around in the streets either. A lot of my week next week will include sitting with my organization’s staff people discussing how we can get parents to come to the workshops, calling them to remind them, and figuring out how to best present the workshops so that the most parents possible are able to attend. This reminds m
No comments:
Post a Comment