Carnaval 2012

This week marks our third Carnaval in Bolivia. However, just like everything else here, it has been very different from our first two in Cochabamba. All I can think of comparing Carnaval in Santa Cruz to is that it feels like the Christmas season in the USA. For the last month there have been parades and people out and about getting their costumes and things ready. All the stores have big sales, the news is abuzz with excitement interviewing the Miss for everything you can think of. Everyone asks about Carnaval plans. It just feels festive.
Churches dread carnaval and the majority literally skip town. They go on spiritual retreats or plan their youth retreat for that week since it is a national holiday anyways. I mean, this is the celebration of the "carne," or the "flesh," before Lent begins and there is a lot of drunkeness and other things that go along with huge masses of drunken people in public. I do find it intersting though that the churches´response is to flee instead of to stay and be a witness to the gospel in the midst of the bad things that go on during this week.
Our experience this week has been different. We were warned that it is a chaotic mess here for these 4 days, much worse than Cochabamba, so we had decided to stay home. Saturday was calm. The evening came and with it the huge parade downtown and the beginning of the 3-day, city-wide water fight. But here they don´t just play with water-- it´s also mud, foam, and colorful ink.
Sunday morning I went for a run past where the parade had been the night before. There were a number of revelers still staggering about the streets, trash everywhere--spent cans of foam, shreds of water balloons, food containers--and the place reeked of urine. Sunday we stayed home because there were no churches to go to since they had left, and Ann had a bad cold. The neighbors had a huge party all day with music so loud we could hardly hear ourselves think. I ventured out a bit to see what was going on in the neighborhood. I expected a war zone of drunken partiers throwing stuff at each other, but it was much different. As I stepped outside, I noticed taxis and busses going by completely covered with mud to protect them from paint thrown at them. Busses seamed to be a popular target as many of them were splattered with color. As I walked through the neighborhood I noticed the street was full of used water balloons and randomly splotched with magenta, indigo, and green ink stains. Children were running around covered in colors from head to toe, water guns in hand, and everyone else was at the big party behind our house, also soaking wet and covered in colors. I realized that the ink thing was not mean-spirited as some people had made it sound. Rather it was part of the celebration. It reminded me of that color festival in India I´ve seen on TV, with people running around dousing each other in bright, happy colors.
I saw how this really was a community event, where friends and family from the smallest children to the oldest people come together and celebrate just for the heck of celebrating and being together, eating lots of food, and dancing in the street to really loud music while wearing colorful wigs, sequins, and loud, colorful shirts. I realized that there are parts of carnaval that are redeemable and it isn´t all just drunken licentiousness but in many places it is a celebration of life and family.
We got to celebrate a little of that on Monday, going out to Juan and Eva´s house and having a big cookout with them and their family, and of course their son Felipe and I got into a big water fight with the neighbor kids. Unfortunately we have been bad at recording any of this and don´t have any pictures to show you, but you can google "carnaval Santa Cruz" if you really want to see what it looks like. Today we are back to sitting at home. Hey, I´ve been able to catch up on a lot of reading and we´ve learned a lot of new popular songs from our neighbors who had another party yesterday and will be back at it again this afternoon.