It's the 25th of December, here I sit in a very warm upstairs room in Quito typing and jamming out to KoRn's brand new single, "Narcissistic Cannibal." Listening to KoRn takes me back to older days, the nostalgia sets in, but I haven't a single idea who the heck the featured groups in the song are, Skrillex and Kill The Noise. Is my age showing? Nonetheless, I'm well over Sarah Mclachlan's "Wintersong" and am ready to welcome in the New Year with some good old 90's Rock!
After getting some feedback on my last, rather skeptical, entry about Navidad, I decided, in honor of the season, that I shouldn't let my readers down entirely. In an effort to save some literary face, I gracefully came through, just a few days earlier, with a Christmas card to all of you, my loved ones, which contained honest and upfront personal sentiments. At the same time, I admit that I rather enjoyed replacing all of Santa's reindeer with animalitos of the selva. I hope you all got a chance to take a look at the card and read up a bit on Yachana's struggles as well. If you didn't get to look at the annual update, please follow this link, http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Happy-Holidays-from-Yachana-.html?soid=1102313672756&aid=AkjA-sqe1gw
Now, before we completely say adiós to the pastors, let me come through on another Christmas promise, telling you about the Navidad celebrations in Quito. Ecuador, like the majority of Latin American countries, is populated predominantly by followers of the Catholic Faith. What this means for Christmas is that many people here still adhere to holiday practices and traditions that are directly linked to the church and the birth of Jesus Christ. Those of you who know me know that I am far from religious, but that I am respectful of the beliefs of others and feel that we should all be free to choose whatever we wish to think or believe. As long as people are not hurting others, impeding or imposing, I think they should do as they wish in terms of this subject. As a secular, non-baptized and non-Catholic individual, I still enjoy observing the practices of the people and even participating in some.
One of my favorite traditions here in Ecuador, and one that I had the opportunity to see for the first time last December, is the displaying of pesebres, or nativity scenes. Just like in the states, where you find a Christmas tree in most every house, here you find a display of the scene of the sacred night in Bethlehem. The first time I saw the pesebres, some of them didn't have baby Jesus. When I asked where the baby was, I was promptly told, "No llega hasta el 25" ["He doesn't come until the 25th"]. Well, duh! :-) In the Cathedral and Convent of San Francisco de Asís of Quito (Saint Francis of Assisi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_of_Assisi & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_and_Convent_of_St._Francis) they display arounf one hundred Nativity Scenes, which are all enrolled in a competition. I'm not really sure what first place wins. I really enjoyed going to see these Nativity Scenes and I made two rather interesting observations: 1. Many of the pesebres were designed with depictions of the Holy Family as indigenous peoples and 2. The plaza where the San Francisco church is located is found right over the ruins of what was the palace of the Inca ruler Atahualpa. I'll let you be the judge of the significance of that historical point (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atahualpa).
I could lecture you on the injustice of the Latin American history and the Spanish Conquest, but I'd imagine you can figure it out for yourself. Anyhow, it's not very Christmasy to talk about how horrible it is that small groups of Spanish forces came and literally wiped out an entire continent of intelligent, well-developed and well-established civilizations of indigenous. Let me just say that I am at least slightly pleased to see the Holy Family being represented as indigenous in Nativity Scenes. It's not entirely justice, but there is some justice in that, I should say. Here are some of my favorite pesebres of that style:
Now you might be expecting me to write that in Ecuador they haven't fallen into the tragic commercialization of Christmas, that they still remember what Christmas is for and they aren't affected by any of the crazy gift-giving mania, but, unfortunately, I can't make that claim. Point in fact, Exhibit A:
I don't want to end this on a negative note, after all it is the Super Special Christmas Blog Exposé. I will tell you that I am skeptical in terms of the coming year, I have my doubts and worries as always. I continue to have my own interior conflicts that I wonder if I'll ever resolve, I find myself thinking about people and things that I've turned over in my mind since the start of this journey and blog. Myself aside, in a macro schema, I worry about what our world is coming to, pollution and its environmental impacts scare the hell out of me, wars continue to be fought, injustices are found around every corner. All of that and more, and yet, I still feel something inside of me telling me to fight. With a look at the micro schema, I see a group of kids from the Ecuadorian Amazon that are reading, writing poems, reflections and short stories, learning math and English and preparing themselves to better the world. What we are doing does matter and I'm not going to give up. I do have hope for humanity still; we must keep in mind that, while we aren't one race, culture, political party or religion, we are one people. We must not let the falseness of borders drawn on a map separate us literally. Pray, hope, dream, sing, yell, cry, bet and WORK for a better world, for a better society, for a better existence for everything and everyone this 2012.
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