On being famous

¨Famous¨ may be the wrong word.  But after I agreed to act in a short comedy in front of the crowds of the festival of San Antonio de Pucará, there have been no shortage of comments from people I know and don´t know about how ¨I´m that girl in the play...¨ People joke and ask if I want to marry them too.  They call me the ´lungita.´ I guess you had to see it to understand...

The festival was last Saturday and included a soccer match (we lost), a voly tournament, various dances, and our little skit.  It was call the ´Divorcio de los indios´ which is in itself awkward because ´indio´ is often an offensive term...especially when used by someone who is not indigenous.  Like saying ´indian´ instead of ´native.´ But I played the role of María (I know, stunningly ironic) who, with her mother Francisca, is asking the local comesario (´cumisario´ is how I had to pronounce it) to divorce her abusive husband Manuel.  Pretty soon Manuel is flipping over the desk and the comesario is tossing a plastic chair aside, and María is hiding behind her mother.  The debate continues, when suddenly María changes her mind and Francisca demands Manuel be a better husband.  Kind of anticlimatic that in the end she takes him back.  But there were a lot of funny moments, and most of mine were when I forgot a line or completely mispronounced a word - like having to say ´Bunitu caballeritu.´ I totally stumbled on this word and pronounced it slowly into the microphone: ¨Boe-nee-too ca-bay-sher-ee-too,¨ and the crowd laughed so hard I could hear people in hysterics.

Oh yea, and I had to dress up as an indigenous woman.  I combined some of Chimborazo clothing with an Otavalo shirt... it looked confused, but fine in the end.

The community has meetings very frequently, for example, there´s a meeting today at 4 p.m. for the tourism council.  Quite a few tourism groups are coming through which the council organizes.

But before that I´m helping out a local woman with her group of kids - kind of like an extracurricular club.  The kids all saw what I´d made out of trash and wanted to make that their next project.  So hopefully today we´ll do some trash collection, wash it all off, and start making some pretty amazing things out of it all.  Apparently they´ll also be interviewing me for their program to be broadcast on Radio Intag.  Fun!

Finally, the school teachers were over for lunch one day and saw all my crafts too - and immediately began making their own chain links out of garbage I´d already cut up.  At the same time my host mom Alicia was continuing the cord on a bag I was knitting out of plastic bags.  It was quite a sight.  So the teachers decided they were going to collect their own trash this week and have me visit on Tuesday to help them teach the kids what to do. 

So I´m already busier in two weeks in Imbabura than I was in over a year in Chimborazo.  It´s exciting stuff. 

And so while I wait for pitifully slow internet to upload one of three videos I have ready, here are some pics!

Pucará

View to Plaza Gutierrez

View from the Pucará gazebo

Soccer game