Party in San Miguel

We were invited to join the part of the community of San Miguel del Bala, to celebrate the birthday of their saint San Miguel. The party lasted for 4 days, but we only joined them the last 2 days. We missed the two days of football, although we did help the schoolkids preparing the field earlier in the week. It includes a machete and a lot of hacking. They do not have paint to mark the lines of the field, but hack a straight line with a machete to cut the grass which also makes a good line. Instead of a white line, you see a brown line of earth. The teachers were measuring out the field with some ropes and the children (including the 5 year old ones) brought heir machete over to help which lasted the whole morning, so no classes.

Together with two English tourists we were joined the party after dinner. The party was quite nice, with both local music and ‘normal’ music. They have the habit here if they listen to music to get as much speakers (and as big) as possible put them on the maximum sound. The local music was played with a snare drum, a big drum and a flute made of a small pvc pipe. It’s amazing what good tones you can get out of a pvc pipe with holes in it. The locals wanted Dolf to try as well, but the sounds he produced on the flute were of different quality. Several times we were asked to dance with people, varying from very drunk gentlemen to grandmothers and people in a more sober state. 
Next to normal beer they had chicha (locally produced beer made from maize and well known by people who have visited Latin America before) from a bucket, beer made from sugar cane and almost pure (100%) alcohol (which specifically listed on the label that the the alcohol could be used for drinking). And of course big bags of coca leaves you have to chew so you can dance all night. Not very different from a Dutch party, if you swap the coca for energy drinks and pills, you have different brands of beers and strong alcohol like whiskey.

The final day of the party the location of dancing was changed from the communal area to the sandy square in front of the church. The saint was carried out at one point and people all kneeled and kissed the statue and made a promise which was written down in a a notebook. After that, the kids lined up and started dancing together hand in hand in an inner circle. The adults joined in the outer circle. At one point a big plastic bathtub full of candies was thrown on the ground during the dancing. Of course the kids scrawled all over the place to get as much candy as possible. The candies have to touch the ground and are a gift to Pachamama (Mother Earth), who gives it back to you as you pick it up from the ground. Nice intermixing of old and catholic faith.

At the moment we are back in Rurre and are struggling a bit with deciding how to progress with developing our educational material. We would like to work together with both guides and teachers to design a good educational program, but it is not so easy to get all the parties together. The people from San Miguel have no cell phone coverage and there are only 1-2 boats per day to San Miguel, which makes it a bit difficult to communicate and make appointments. The teachers all have a double job (since teaching at a school is only half a day of work). Of course we would like to design educational material which all parties will be using after we are gone, but designing a practicum, theoretical classes and train both teachers and guides, all in cooperation with locals is a bit too much work in two months. We already decided to postpone the teacher training and theoretical classes to the next period (April/ May 2014) and to make the practical a bit easier than we originally planned. It is still a challenge to design a practical which will make 4 schools enthusiastic and a lot of logistics is included as well, so Dolf has decided to appoint himself as coordinator. Preferably a local has the coordination role, but at the moment they are too busy with their normal work. This means a lot of running back and forth to the different organisations to make appointments and redesign proposals. Annelies is more focussing on the content of the educational material. We have made a good division of tasks this way and hope we will able to produce some useful educational materials which are of good quality.

We have made some nice pictures again in San Miguel an will upload these asap.