Founders Day Festival and the Campo Shuffle

There is another volunteer in our community named John or Juan Alto (he’s kind of tall). He lives in a community 10 minutes away on a bus from our provincial capital city. He, with his long legs can do the distance on foot in 30 minutes. He’s a voracious reader and chooses many of his daily activities for the humorous value in them. Laurel and I were happy to find out that we would be living near him for two years (we could have had worse). Despite, or maybe because of the harshness of the jungle town he lives in, John possesses an admirable attitude. I wonder if he’s writing it all down for the sake of a good stand up routine one day.

John’s rowdy Kichwa community was having their founder’s day celebration one weekend and a bunch of us volunteers were invited. We showed up around 8 at night to the central basketball court with the large roof. Each of the families had constructed a booth like one might find at a summer fair. They also dragged their refrigerators out there, plugged into generators, to keep the beer cold. Our kind of party. We caught the second half of the women’s finals football match on the cement court.

We sat on some benches in John’s host family’s booth and drank Pilsners. Laurel and Ben were also there. After the game the floor opened up and the band started playing traditional Kichwa music. Kichwa music can be described as native, repetitive, loud, but somewhat modernized with the use of electric guitars, base guitars and drum sets. Each song typically takes 12 to 15 minutes and at no time does any part of the song sound different from another. Though played very loud, it is usually very reserved. The dancing follows suit.

The “campo shuffle” as we call it, is dancing like an 80 year old grandfather, barely moving your feet and arms, walking around your partner like a dance number at Buckingham Palace circa 1630. Nobody touches each other or looks you in the eye. It’s like a form of dancing was created to depict how bored you actually are. There is one thing though, beer flows freely on the dance floor. The tradition is to bring a beer out with you and pour a little in someone’s cup. Then, after they swig the beer, they take the bottle and pour into someone else’s cup. Rinse, repeat, wipe hands on pants. I was a little annoyed at first about having to share my beer (we don’t make that much money) until I saw, in all its glory, the wave of growing numbers of beer bottles on the dance floor. I eventually had more than enough people who wanted to pour beer into my cup. Awesome.

On top of that, there were three distinctive forms of hard stuff floating around. The old two liter bottles of coke with clear liquid in it, that’s the “vente-chinco” (“25 cents” in Kichwa accented Spanish). It’s called that because it costs vente cinco centavos but actually it’s crude sugarcane liquor. It also tastes like battery acid or Golden Grain – 190. Definitely go easy with that stuff. Then there is the fermented chicha, warm. This is actually not bad and resembles warm sake – kind of. Then there is the cheap box wine from the city’s grocery stores. Since I got to Ecuador I never really liked this stuff, too sweet. After the battery acid and the foul sake however, this stuff was delicious. Wash it all down with another Pilsner (the national beer of Ecuador) and do the campo shuffle. John then reminds you that this is his life.

Some people seem to be trying to convince themselves that they actually like their harsh conditions. John certainly has one of the harsher sites. While Laurel and I live in an apartment with a laundry store downstairs, John lives in a poorly built wooden structure with gaps in the boards, a bathroom that requires manual flushing, lots of biting bugs, lots of town drunks, no running water and the river is the shower and the place where you wash your clothes. But when John reminds you that he loves his site even with all of the, shall we say, colorful charm – you know he’s not trying to convince anyone of anything. I’m beginning to think that a good sense of humor is the most important coping mechanism any person could ever have.