Speaking of Chicken Related Fun…

The other week I was helping the women harvest some peanuts when a couple of girls from my 7th/8th grade class invited me to go swimming in the river nearby. I didn’t have a change of clothes on me, but why not, I thought. It was a rare warm but pleasant day to break up the cold autumn days we had been having. Jimena, a tiny 11 year old lent me a pair of shorts with a big rip in the crotch, my pasty white legs covered in mosco bites were on full display, and Mirta lent me a shirt that was basically a soccer jersey. I knew I looked totally ridiculous, but I didn’t care. The water was amazing. It was cool and refreshing and is the closest thing I’m going to get to a beach in the next 2 years so I took full advantage. I felt like a kid, I felt alive and totally uninhibited. I wanted to remember the feeling, the scene, the first impression of being in that place for the first time and this is what I wrote after I returned from that first trip to the river: The view devastated me. The sun scorched earth, the trees lining the riverbank and the land eroded away by the fast flowing water, the endless blue of the sky above the trees, the light seeping through it all, like a river flowing through a desert. So beautiful it hurt to look at, so I turned away, looked down at the dirt path and at the sugarcane fields to the left. Raised my head again to be shocked by the tragic beauty of the landscape. Couldn’t look away again. Breathed in deeply and tried to breath in the view. Felt like I was home, longed for the ocean, the sound of the ocean only. We made our way over the rocks to the salt less water where I was appeased, refreshed, cleansed.

I realized something kind of ridiculous while we were swimming that day. Basically, living in Bolivia is the closest I’ll come to being a rock star. I mean whatever I do these kids want to imitate. If I do a belly flop they want to do a belly flop, if I do a cannonball they do a cannonball. They want to know everything I know: songs, dances, games, what have you. And then once they learn something they can’t get over it. They want to do it over and over again. And the great thing is that it doesn’t matter the age of the kids, they all have this innocent curiosity and excitement. I played duck, duck, goose with kids aged 5 through 13 and they were all really into it. It’s kind of bizarre and kind of awesome. It was swimming with the girls that I got the idea to teach the first graders the chicken dance for Mother’s day. We were dancing on the riverbank, just messing around, Jimena asked me to show the chicken dance to Mariela and Mirta so I did. Earlier that day the first grade teacher had asked me to teach an “American” dance to his class for the big Mother’s day celebration on May 27th. The girls thought it was a good idea and starting talking about how the kids could have their moms pluck chickens to make wings for them to wear. Luckily that didn’t happen. Instead we had wings made out of cut newspapers and red construction paper crests attached with bobby pins to the kids’ heads. They looked so fricken adorable. Since I didn’t have the music to the chicken dance we used this Spanish song called “La Gallinita Turuleca” and since this song is about a chicken that lays eggs all over the house the kids also had little balloon eggs to drop as they entered. I stood in front guiding them and the professor would blow a whistle for them to change to the next move (the dance was modified to be even easier for them.) The timing was all off but I think they did an awesome job and they were definitely the cutest of the day.

Mother’s Day is a pretty big deal here. It seems like the school had been preparing for weeks. Each class performed songs and dances, most of them traditional Bolivian dances with costumes and all. You pretty much can’t have a dance without some specific clothing to go along with it. The 7th/8th grade girls wanted me to teach them a dance as well. We had about a week to prepare and originally I started teaching them a simple salsa step. That got Bolivianized into a very slow, kind of rhythm-less and repetitive motion, it definitely wasn’t salsa. I don’t know how well the dance turned out, it wasn’t what I had originally envisioned, but it was definitely a lot of fun rehearsing with the girls at my house, it gave me something to do in the afternoons. After all the dances the moms played games, decent ones, with prizes. There were musical chairs, a potato sack race, spoon in mouth potato relay, find the coin in a plate of flour using only your mouth among others. My favorite was definitely the one where the women had to race around all four corners of the cancha and finish a glass of something at each corner. The stations had beer, wine, soda and Sengani, which is a grape liquor, and they had to go around twice. Seeing cholitas run in their polleras is priceless.

After the games there was a lunch, which had been cooked by the men of course, and then the real festivities began. There was drinking and dancing from the afternoon on into the wee hours of the night. The teachers, the moms, the grandmas all got wasted. Drinking in Bolivia is a tricky thing because you are invited to a drink (te invito) and then in turn you have to invite someone else, if you don’t you have to drink more. So there was a lot of invitaring going on and a lot of drunk mamas. I was constantly being invited to drink and to dance and as the night went on and people got drunker I kept making up excuses to escape, saying I would dance “en un ratito” or I would leave for a bit saying, “ahorita vengo.” I mostly danced with the women and children. One of the mothers every time she saw me would stumble towards me and say “LA PROFESORA MICHELLE!” At one point she also asked me to be the madrina of her daughter’s first communion but I’m not sure that she’ll remember that she asked me. I’m sure her 6 year old will though. Another woman, one from the group I work with, would constantly grab me just as I was about to make my exit, insisting that I dance one more song. They all seemed to be thrilled that I was there participating in the festivities and I felt like it was important for me to compartir, to share, in the happiness of the day. The advances of some stumbling drunks I could have done without, but I held my own, hell I’m from NY and I know how to take care of myself, plus I really felt like all the women had my back, sensing when I was in an uncomfortable situation and pulling me out of it. When I had had enough of box wine and soda, cumbia music and drunk campesinos I called it a night. It was still early so I left saying I would be back in just a minute. I heard people coming back from the festivities around 1:30am and in typical Bolivian style they scheduled a parents meeting at the school for 7:00am. Not sure how many mamas made it, I´m sure they were all with ch´aqui (hungover.) ¡Feliz día de la Madre!