Although the feria is an all-week thing, we enjoyed our last day of it on Wednesday. The meeting Thursday with our Peace Corps superiors and the Guatemalan Ministry of Health took place in Huehuetenango, the state capitol, and for us to arrive there on time would be a physical impossibility with the bus schedules unless we spent wednesday night in Santa Eulalia, a thing we rarely do. This turned into a blessing in disguise; firstly because it gave us the chance to take up Pedro’s offer of hospitality that he keeps making. Secondly, because wednesday’s festivities mostly take place in the twilight hours after the busses out to the villages have stopped running.
Some of the things that Guatemalans love the most in the whole world, besides The Virgin Mary and tortillas, are bombas (fireworks). Pyrotechnics appear at all festive occasions; for birthdays, a 6-foot chains of firecrackers is mandatory. For more serious occasions like weddings and holy days, they bust out the Big Guns. They have these tubes of steel, about 4 inches across and about two feet high, welded to big iron bases to keep them pointed at the sky. I don’t know what they’re called here, but I would use the word “mortar”. Then they stick this explosive charge into them that looks like a softball with a 3-foot fuse. They light it with a cigarette, and run like hell. The bomba is a two-part charge: the first one goes off with a thunderclap, sending the larger explosive hundreds of feet into the air. An internal fuse causes the second charge to go off about when it reaches apogee (more on that later). Some make bright colors like our Independence Day fireworks, others make enormous bangs and rattle every window in town.
So, they fired off a fair amount of those in the town square in front of the church. In UN-typical Guatemala fashion, they made everyone stand at the very edge of the square, giving the demolitions guys room to work. “Yeah, about 8 years ago they shot off one of the big ones, and the second charge didn’t go off right. It hung in the air for a minute or so, fell back in to the crowd, and then went off. Someone got killed, so they don’t let you stand right next to them anymore,” Aurelio later told us. Um, yeah.
As the evening wore on, we got to see one of those monstrosities he mentioned. Two guys came waddling out carring what looked like a concrete-filled truck rim with a man-sized steel tube cast into it. “Oh no,” I remember thinking. Then another guy came out carring a bomba the size of a volleyball, with a 6-foot fuse, and dropped it in. Despite my subconscious urge to flee for my life, I had to see what was going to happen. He lit it with his cigarette, and nothing. He looked annoyed, lit it again, and still nothing. A few more guys came out, they spoke some hushed words, and he puffed on his smoke a few times in rapid succession to get the embers really hot. He touched it to the fuse, and red fire shot out the end. Everyone scattered like roaches on the kitchen floor when the lights come on.
The first explosion was a little disappointing. “Maybe the ratio of the surface area of the tube opening to the launching charge’s explosion is actually lower than the others, lessening the overall velocity of the projectile and escaping gasses, thereby reducing the noise despite the overall increase in imparted energy,” I thought to myself. That thought was interrupted by the second explosion, which knocked over children, small animals, and several of the more poorly-built structures in the central urban area.
Oops, Emily says I have to admit that I lied in that last sentence. But it WAS awfully loud.
The other great joy we experienced in our final day of the feria was the torito, or “little bull”. They had three of them at the Virgen de Guadalupe festival in our village, so I sortof knew what they are about: it’s a wicker “bull”, maybe more the size and shape of a really big steamer trunk, with a big cardboard box inside. A bull’s face is painted on the front, which is funny to me, because for MOST of them, the bull’s face is the distincitve “Chicago Bulls” logo, blown up big on a photocopier and glued onto the front of the torito. Then, the wicker cage is adorned with all types of fireworks: whistlers, roman candles, bangers, rockets, spinners, you name it, all of which are chained together with a really long fuse. I am ashamed to admit that when they had them in our village, we were too tired the night they lit them off to go see them. As we found out Wednesday, that was a big oversight.
That’s because we made the SILLY assumption that they just set these contraptions on the ground in front of the church and light them. Goodness no, this is Guatemala! There is a dude that climbs inside, another dude that wears a matador costume, and they have a mock bullfight! WHILE THE WHOLE THING IS ON FIRE!!!!!! I never would have believed it, but I have the pictures to prove it. The bull galavants around the town square, fireworks shooting off in random direction, launching into the crowd, setting stuff on fire- HILARIOUS. A bottle rocket shot off of a torito at one point and bounced off of Emily, then started chasing other bystanders around as they screamed and hollered. All the while, the guy inside the bull is jumping and dancing and charging the matador and teasing the crowd, the cardboard “shell” inside protecting him from the worst of the pyrotechincs. Emily said it reminded her of the Catalunyan correfoq, a marching pyrotechnics parade & festival they have in parts of Spain.
They’d built five toritos, so that part of the festivities took quite a while, and was wholely entertaining. About half way through it, the “bull” slipped on a banana peel (no, I’m serious; the square is a fruit market during the day) and fell over. I felt bad for him for about .4 seconds, then realized that his rocket launchers were now pointing at the crowd instead of the sky. Luckily, he jumped right back up and carried on, before the fuse burned down to where the rockets were. We found out a few days later that the secret guy in the torito was actually our friend Luin, the quiet timid statistician from the health center. Hah!
Having seen all this, I feel like we had a good faire. It also helped me to answer one of those gnawing cultural questions that had been bugging me since December. A few days after our village’s Guadalupe celebration, I was chopping wood outside our house and saw the local kids playing in an empty lot next door. They were chasing each other around, giggling and screaming, generally having a good time. Then i noticed that two of the kids were running around with a big cardboard box over their heads. It was on fire.
My initial distress faded as I remembered seeing these same kids play with rusty machetes, used syringes, and rabid dogs. What’s a flaming box? So I went inside, reported the incident to Emily, and went back to chopping. Now, as Paul Harvey says, “I know the rest of the story”.
Note: I took a GREAT video of the toritos as well. Maybe if I find a fast connection, I can upload it.