The Old Man Burns Again

On December 31, 2007 I was a mere observer of the “Año Viejo” tradition, the one in which Ecuadorians of all races and classes stuff old clothes with newspaper, scrap wood, and whatever other combustible material they can find to make an “old man,” who represents the year about to end. Sometimes they add a papier-maché mask—of a devil, clown, cartoon character, politician, friend or family member—and a cigar or other accessory and light the whole thing on fire at midnight. You purge what you didn’t like about your own or others’ behavior in the previous twelve months, but you can also celebrate the good as well. In true Ecuadorian fashion, the “old man” can be whatever you want him to be. No pasa nada.



I decided that this year (last year) it was my turn to partake. Here you can see the sad but charming old man my friend Kelly and I made. We didn’t set out to make a Sponge Bob replica, but we’re beginners and I was fresh out of flour-and-water paste.

Kelly composing last thoughts for 2008.

Another part of the tradition is that you can stick notes on your guy. Again, these can be congratulatory or critical, but I opted for the latter. I’m not evolved enough to be able to burn what brings me joy. You can see that Kelly and I had a few things we wanted to bid adieu.


We burned our Sponge Bob and walked through the streets set ablaze as if Colombia had dropped a bunch of marionette bombs. New Year’s Eve here happens in the neighborhoods, and each usually has at least one bonfire into which everyone’s old man gets flung. Some people also write and post testimonies, either things they promise to do (or stop doing) or satirical send-ups of neighbors for everyone to see. On our way to the big bonfire in the central park, we passed one testimony of a man who promised not to complain to his wife so much when he comes home drunk in 2009.


It’s hard to decide which part of this tradition I like the most: making the doll, writing up my goodbyes-good riddances, lighting the thing on fire, or attempting to roast marshmallows over the glowing ruins. All I can say is that I felt liberated and optimistic watching our creation be reduced to ash. The people I allowed to upset me, my bad habits, the big global problems that are beyond my power to change were all transformed to the good in that fifteen-minute fire, simply through the recognition that it is never too late to begin anew.

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.

Burning the Old Man

The first sign for me, never having spent the end of the year in Ecuador before, was the pile of headless stuffed figures dressed in jeans and button-down shirts on the street corner. I didn’t think much of it at first because on any given street corner, at any given time, you can find things from mangoes to DVDs to diet supplements. But when I started seeing stacks of the stuffed people on street corners all over Quito and an array of freakish masks, I asked. “Those are the old men,” my friend informed me.

The last few days of every year Ecuadorians pick out their old man, give him a face, attach notes to him conveying whatever sentiments, thoughts, etc they want to get rid of, and then burn the whole thing on the street. The old man, 2007, is reduced to ash, and for added affect, men don party dresses and wigs and parade around as the widows of the old men. My guess is these are mostly straight men, based on the unsophisticated drag, but I’m sure some gay men get into the act to, since it’s the only time of the year when cross-dressing is widely accepted.

On New Year’s Eve I was in Cuenca, which I discovered is fairly buttoned-down during the holiday, but that afternoon people were busy preparing a massive float for the midnight parade. The old men to be burned were none other than the Spanish Prime Minister, the King of Spain (am I the only person who didn’t realize Spain still has a king?), and Hugo Chavez. I didn’t get the joke until I saw the end-of-the-year news montages on TV: at a meeting in Chile earlier in the year, Hugo Chavez was insulting the Prime Minister, and the King, sitting between them, said, “¿Por qué no te calles?”—why don’t you just shut up? It wasn’t long before the King’s phrase got ripped to an MP3 file and downloaded as a ringtone on millions of Ecuadorian cell phones. As my Ecuadorian friend put it, “Chavez is Chavez. We all know how obnoxious he is. But on the other hand he’s still a head of state. You (referring to the King) can’t treat him like he’s one of your servants.”

So all three went up in flames as Ecuador prepared for 2008. But not all the old men were politicians. Here’s a baby Shrek (the movie is wildly popular here—I don’t know why) named Pipicho, the Kichwa word for penis. Who knows what notes were attached to that one . . .