Whirwind weekend

Frisbee... grocery shopping... cooking... cleaning... Bible study... friend's house... sleepover in the living room... church... friends for lunch... picking up furniture... sick baby. It was a full two days! The party in Mallasilla seemed to continue picking up speed and volume until it reached a crescendo Saturday afternoon. We had been invited mid-day on Saturday to visit some friends we haven't spent time with in a while and right before our weekly Bible study, we decided to invite ourselves to stay the night in their living room to avoid the drunken mayhem. It's Mallasilla's official birthday on Labor Day and one family each year throws a party for neighbors far and wide. What this includes, explained to us by our Bolivian friends, is spending tens of thousands of dollars on tents, sound equipment, and beer. Lots of beer. The families that participate in hosting these parties are the lower class and they are asked by the previous year's host, only to be completely rejected from the community if they are to say "no". No one says "no". Aymara are very communal and relational- there is no such thing as the individual, so to be rejected is basically the end of your life as you know it. So, what we know of construction workers, which would be a typical job for one of these men, we figured a yearly salary of less than $4,000. $4,000 yearly income and a 3-day party for $20,000= debt for years to come, or possibly the rest of your life. Besides being horrifically annoyed by the noise, we were extremely saddened to see so many living their lives for a momentary party that brings them acceptance from their neighbors. At one point, sometime late during the night before I had given up and put earplugs in (wanting to be able to hear Natty, who seemed to be waking from the music), I felt like I was in a scene from a movie. You know when someone goes to a fair and they get terribly sick or poisoned and the cameras pan to a close-up of a clown wildly laughing, children screaming with cotton candy in their hands, the merry-go-round whirling out of control- all with blurry, bright lights and blaring carnival music? Are you with me? This is how I felt lying in my dark bedroom- that's how ridiculous it was. So, we made the decision to skip night #3 of that all-inclusive party and work-it camping style on the living room floor of friends. It was SO quiet there.

So, after we had friends over for lunch today, we headed over to the house of a US military family who had offered us some old couches. Since they are moving, they also threw in a couple things they didn't want- a wooden rocking horse from Africa and a great, red kid's bike for Natty! As missionaries, we've learned the best things you can get here are from other missionaries (or foreigners) who are leaving. Natty looks too cute on her rocking horse!