Fiestas de Paccha, Parte Uno

Last month, I visited my friend Whitni in her site of Paccha, in the cloud forest of Ecuador.  I brought two dozen live crabs as a gift from the coast for her host family, and we had fun with those.  After we ate them, we all settled back for an afternoon of watching the Olympics on TV, eventually all dozing off during the speedwalking marathon.  (It was a very exciting event, but we were very full of crab.)

 

The next day, however, marked the last day of Paccha's town festivals.  Town festivals are usually a good excuse for not getting much work done for about a month - I'm talking about for the townspeople, not for Peace Corps volunteers.  It is difficult, however, to get much work done when nobody else in town is doing much of anything.  On the last day of festivities in Paccha, not much work got done, but there was definitely no dozing permitted.  We had a full day, starting with Whitni's host family calling us over and telling us to report immediately to the local elementary school.  Knowing better than to ask questions, we got ready and headed over to the school.  We showed up to bleachers full of people ready to watch the school's presentation in honor of the festivals of Paccha.  They went a little something like this:

 

Dancing.

 

Munchkins.

 

Dancing munchkins.

(This, by the way, is why Ecuadorians can dance and Americans cannot: they learn it in school at age 5.)

 

The teachers were on standby to guide any stray munchkins who forgot the choreography.

 

These traditional dances usually involve the men (boys) and women (girls) splitting up and performing separately at some point during the routine.

My favorite part of the performance was when Emilia, the little girl in Whitni's host family, decided that she, too, wanted to be a part of the school dance.  She wriggled out of her mother's arms and began climbing down the bleachers.  Various adults picked her up and handed her down to the next row until she had reached the ground.  She walked over to the dancing girls and stepped right into the circle.

Precocious, much?

 

Next up came the teachers and staff:

 

Their performance was very similar to the children's, the chief difference being that they knew all the choreography and did not need teachers blowing whistles to signify the next part of the routine.

Also, they were perhaps more graceful than the munchkins, all flowing skirts and broad shoulders.

Little Emilia returned to her seat for this number. 

 

And that's what you can expect to see at a school presentation during the town festival.  This was only the first part of our day.  Upon the end of the dancing, Whitni and I prepared for what came next, the main attraction of the Paccha festival and what the townspeople had waited all month for: the rodeo.  To be continued...