Godmother of a Beautiful New……….Spotlight

Throughout Perú and much of Latin America, nearly every town and community celebrates a patron saint. Currently Pacora, my municipality, is celebrating the birth of San Pablo, the patron saint of the town. While the central day of the festival is the 30th of June, the celebration is already in full swing and I’ve been told it doesn’t end until the 13th of July. For weeks now, the plaza has been completely surrounded by temporary restaurants and vendors, each one blasting a different cumbia song at inordinate volumes. Recently, a really frightening train posing as a children’s ride was set up on one corner of the plaza. I saw it running the other day and I honestly can not imagine putting a child on board, let alone paying to do so. It runs at ludicrously high speeds all the while emitting disturbing noises.

I’m struggling with the fact that this festival is supposedly in honor of a saint. I attended a large mass in honor of the patron saint with my host-mom and even that didn’t convince me. However, that probably had something to with the fact that in the middle of the mass they decided to hold a benediction for recently installed spotlights. Of course no blessing is complete without godfathers and godmothers and I soon found myself holding one of the ten red strings dangling down from the new lights. Mind you, I had no clue what I was being named a godmother of until the next day and, thus, assumed that holding the red string had some more grandiose significance. My host-mom was also included as a godmother, along with 8 other unsuspecting people. After the priest made the rounds blessing the lights, splashing each of us in the face with holy water, we were asked to make a donation. The woman collecting the money paused briefly in front of me but I stared at her awkwardly until she walked away. At this point I assumed we would return to our seats and listen to the rest of the mass. Instead, we were taken to a small room on the side of the church where we were fed. First, they gave us whiskey cocktails. Not what I expected. My mom didn’t drink hers so she gave it to me. I was the only one there that drank two of them and I’ll just say that I was feeling it by the time I was done. The alcohol was promptly followed by chicken and mayonnaise sandwiches. I even would have eaten the chicken, despite the fact that my host-mom thinks I never eat it, but I despise mayonnaise. And knowing that it had come from a bottle that said “Please refrigerate after opening,” directions that had certainly been disregarded, I just couldn’t do it. My host-mom said she didn’t want my sandwich and then proceeded to take a second sandwich from the tray. Thus, I was forced to stuff the large chicken and mayonnaise sandwich into my pocket. That wasn’t awkward. Once we had finished we were brought back into the mass which I sat through somewhat buzzed. I’ll say that it was more entertaining than a normal mass but I didn’t feel any holier for attending.

The next day I met Susan at the fiesta. First we went to the soccer game, where after about an hour we realized we were indeed the only females there. Roughly half of the people there had mullets so we probably should have left. One man tried to pick us up by throwing a rock at Susan’s head. That was ingenious. At one point an older man walked in and, despite the large amount of blatantly obvious empty seating, sat directly next to me. This I contribute to the inexistence of the concept of personal space in Peru; however, once he realized who he was sitting by, his interests turned from the game to us. He passed the rest of the time staring at us with a baffled expression on his face. After the game we went back to the plaza, where we attempted to avoid joining the large quantities of young Peruvians incessantly circling the park. We decided to split a beer which was probably scandalous, since women here don’t tend to drink among themselves, at least not in public. Most of our time was spent people watching and ignoring drunken men. Compared to the first festival I attended back in January, I realized that I now viewed the festival from a different perspective, much more aware of who was there and more accurately able to describe what was going on. Later on we went to the dance, which is unlike anything you would call a dance in the States. The first thing we noticed was that, to enter was to enter accepting your fate in the case of fire. The only entrance and exit was through a tiny door, roughly four feet tall. Due to the current cricket plague, there were crickets everywhere, which made the already dirty locale a bit more disgusting. The crickets did have one upside: they made it easier to laugh at the drunken men who asked us to dance, as they usually approached with one perched like a pet on their shoulders. A trip to the bathroom revealed the grossest bathroom I’ve ever seen, complete with crickets. Imagine many human fluids of different forms and then imagine crickets jumping from those fluids onto your face.

To my surprise I returned to the festival the next day with my host-mother to attend the morning mass. Of course, we had to get there two hours early so we could sit and watch them set up. At 11:05, the local priest came over the loud speakers to say that the bishop from Chiclayo would be arriving shortly and that he was happy to announce that the mass would start on time. I found the announcement somewhat confusing given that the mass was supposed to start at 11:00. We ended up staying in Pacora until 6:00 pm which was somewhat tortuous given that I had no idea how long we were going to stay. We got lunch, not at one of the restaurants, but from a sketchy looking street vendor. Granted, we only paid $1 each, but I consider it a miracle that I suffered no ill effects. As we were leaving I had to laugh when a group of men offered me a drink only to receive a death glare from my host-mom. It shut them up immediately. If you’d seen it you would understand.