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.

Fruits of Change

After a long hiatus, the blog is back, and I am back in Ecuador, this time to live. I’ve chosen Tena, a city in the Amazon jungle with a population of 16,000, as my home base. When I tell people, especially Ecuadorians, where I live, I get a wide range of reactions, from impressed amazement to bewildered disbelief. Even though five years ago I never would have imagined myself taking up residence in the jungle, it’s neither as adventurous or as dangerous as it might sound. My comfortable apartment has wood floors and cement walls and a patio overlooking the mature fruit trees and ornamental plants that the landlords planted years ago. On mornings when I don’t have meetings or community visits, I sit out there with my coffee and observe the butterflies at work. I can go a week without seeing the same kind twice. So when people ask, “Why Tena?” (or “Why Tena!”), here is what I tell them:

Fruits that look like they come from outer space: I discovered the anona when my landlady picked one from the tree that grows outside in the yard and brought it to me as a welcome gift. Though I haven’t been in the habit of eating fruit that resembles a porcupine, the inside of an anona is gooey and sweet, like tapioca without the disgusting globules. It’s great in cakes, and I plan to try to make ice cream with it next.

Lazy birdwatching: Again, with my cup of coffee on the patio. No binoculars needed.

Inspiring neighbors: Visiting different Kichwa communities for Global Pediatric Alliance, I’ve met a lot of people with little formal education but excellent ideas: One group wants to build dry ecological toilets so they not only will they have sanitation for the first time, but the toilets won’t contaminate the groundwater and will produce completely safe organic compost for gardens. A friend of mine, a father of six who has not had steady work for almost a year, has decided to take a huge risk and go into business for himself, converting a plot of family land into an Kichwa ecolodge. Another friend of mine, who has some university education, presented me with a ten-page proposal to train Kichwa women and young people to be community leaders after I casually mentioned that someday it would be interesting to collaborate on that type of project.

Fewer distractions: Yes, I’ve got t.v. (but not cable) and yes, I’ve got internet (but no high-speed line in my home yet), and yes, my neighbors play salsa music or a compiliation of 80s American music that's a bestseller at the bootleg CD shops here, but despite all of that, I often find myself surrounded by quiet or the noises of nature. Somehow, having fewer things plugged into the wall or running on batteries, I find it it easier to read, write, and think.

Sunsets: After a long, hot day in Tena fighting with the phone company or standing in lines to pay my utility bills, I walk home through town, across the airport tarmac (since the only flights are occasional a government prop planes, at dusk it’s turned into a running track and volleyball court), and watch the sunset over the lush mountains of Llanganates Reserve. Although many, many thousands of trees have been cut down in this area, the forests in the park are still in tact. The sun sinking behind those mountains reminds me that my human clock and the concerns it drives are, at the end of the day, insignificant.

This Is How We Dance in Caipirona

For as many times as I’ve suffered disappointment from plans falling through in Ecuador, I’ve also benefited greatly from that same lack of predictability. It was serendipity that recently delivered me to Caipirona, a Kichwa village in the jungle where big decisions were being made. And I got to be a small part of them.

A friend of mine who works for the city of Tena spontaneously invited me to join him on a 45-minute ride in a pick up truck (this time inside the comfortable cab) to where the road ended at a wide river. Alone in the rain, we waited for a canoe. A thin, elderly, brown figure in wading boots approached from the opposite bank, and as she plowed unperturbed into the current, we realized there would be no canoe. We rolled our pants up to our thighs, took off our shoes, and crossed the river yelping every time we stepped on a sharp rock, which was often. I skipped the attempt to put on brave face, since my friend, who is Kichwa and has probably crossed rivers barefoot hundreds of times, was as much a baby as I.

We arrived in the middle of a clearing with a handful of huts, the largest of which was an open-air and thatched-roof structure. About 40 people—babies, old people, teenage nursing mothers, barefoot kids, middle-aged men and women, and a few twenty-somethings—sat in a circle. This was a big political assembly, I discovered, and they’d been sitting in this circle for the last twelve hours discussing everything from the price of their farm lots to the lack of potable water.

I slipped in behind my friend, who followed the custom of shaking the hand of every single adult present, and tried to figure out what was going on. On a dais at the front sat four youngish men speaking Kichwa into a microphone. Occasionally, a woman named Bertha would grab the other microphone and interrupt or correct them, eliciting laughter or cheers from the rest of the group, which was mostly silent. I watched this exchange for a good hour without having a clue what they were talking about. I wasn’t sure if the rest of the people knew either. To me they looked bored out of their minds, but how would I know?

Eventually a bowl of chicha, mildly fermented yucca milk, reached me and I took a few obligatory sips. It’s a taste I haven’t acquired and probably never will—to me chicha tastes the way moldy laundry smells. At that point, my friend, representing the local government, got up to speak in Kichwa about projects, and then I heard my name mentioned. Before I knew it, he handed me the microphone and told me to explain to the group what I was doing there. This would have been easy except for the fact that I hate speaking in public, much less in Spanish, and I didn’t know what I was doing there. Somehow I managed to make something up, maybe thanks to the chicha.

Hours passed. I vacillated between fascination at the social dynamic—who got to speak when, who got the most attention from the audience—and isolation and even a bit of fear. I was utterly a stranger there. But I also felt a little stunned. Five years ago I never would have imagined myself sitting in a straw and wood hut with 40 Kichwa people debating their issues of the day in the Amazon rainforest.

Toward the end of the assembly, the group held elections for the new community president and officers. (The village officials usually have more actual power than the mayor of Tena because they have to face the community daily, though that doesn´t necessarily make them less corrupt or more motivated. Politics is the same wherever you go.) Bertha stood and announced, in Spanish, that she wanted my friend and I to count the votes since we were impartial. I found myself sitting at the dais, microphone in hand, reading off the names of each person in attendance so he or she could cast a vote. Meanwhile my friend tallied and certified the proceedings.

Afterwards we were treated to a big lunch of beef soup, and the attention turned to the band of musicians playing traditional Kichwa songs. My piece of beef was too tough to chew, and since I didn’t have a napkin, I looked for an inconspicuous place to spit it out. I was still looking when a man approached me with his hand extended. To my horror, I thought he wanted me to spit it into his palm. First I show up at their meeting unannounced, then I butcher their names over the loudspeaker, and now I insult their cuisine. When I protested, the man pulled me into the center of the floor, where he told me in Spanish, “This is how we dance in Caipirona.” Still chewing, now mortified that everyone could see the enormous wad in my cheek, I danced with him. My friend and a few other people joined us, and I started to enjoy the stranger-in-a-strange-land role. The song went on and on. By the time we sat down, the meat was soft enough to swallow, which I did.