Carnaval 2008: I Ate a Worm

. . . and not for 2 million dollars or whatever those Fear Factor contestants get for their repugnant dares. The Chonta Kuru, a short fat worm with a distinctly worm-like appearance even when smoked over a fire in a banana leaf, is a seasonal delicacy around here. I’ve known about it, and avoided it, for three years. But at a meeting with some Kichwa folks from San Pedro, where GPA is helping build a potable water system, I learned that the community was going to build a floating bar and serve comida tipica (local cuisine) to raise some extra money at the Carnaval festivities just down the river in Misahualli. Wanting to support the group, I said I’d drop in for a bite to eat and later realized what I had committed myself to.

Really, the worm wasn’t that bad. Six came with my order and I could only bring myself to eat one, minus the head. It had the texture of overcooked shrimp but was nicely salted and served with tasty pieces of hearts of palm. I washed it down (pretty literally) with chicha de chonta, a semi-fermented drink made, in this case, of palm. Normally chicha is made with yuca (I think it’s the same as manioc, which is a bland, fibrous tuber), and traditionally women chewed the yuca and spit it into a vat to aid the fermentation process. I’ve heard (and choose not to learn otherwise) that people skip the chew-and-spit step nowadays. I’ve tried chicha de yuca, but the drink made with chonta is much better.

But food is just a minor part of Carnaval — the real mission is to get as many people as possible, preferably strangers, soaking wet, covered with spray foam (kind of like Silly String), dunked in the river, covered with mud, drenched with beer, or even slathered with raw egg. In the day and a half I spent on the river at Misahualli, I was dry for about five hours. During the day there were bikini contests, concerts, canoe trips, and carnival rides, and at night there was traditional Kichwa music and dance, plus salsa and reggaeton, but always, always there was a spray of liquid coming from somewhere.

A friend of mine from the US complained that in Ecuador, everyone is fair game at Carnaval—it’s not just about playing tricks on your friends. But that is one of the things I love about the holiday. In a society that is often strictly and blatantly segregated by race and class lines, Carnaval distributes the fun evenly for a few days. Little Kichwa kids can pelt mestiza ladies with water balloons, and most will shriek and laugh and possibly even return fire with spray foam. Taxi drivers will get squirted with water pistols if they leave their windows down, store clerks tag customers, neighbors chase each other with pots of water, and foreigners like me are probably the easiest prey of all. At the beach Lionel, ten-year-old son of one of my Kichwa friends, found me in crowd of several hundred and after his usual sweet hello threw a bucket of river water in my face. I got him back, though.