Sunday August 15, 2010
The high point of the Cultural Caravan’s second week in Playas was the completion of the mural on Sunday, August 15. Painted by local teenagers and kids under the direction of Alex Yagual and Edison Borbor of the Associación Cultural Mullo and Caravanista Javier Salamanca, it depicts the local kids’ visions of Playas’ past, present, and future, all above an undercurrent of the sea and its wildlife.
The mural enabled the kids to learn about their roots and express their ideas about what needs to be improved in Playas. Their vision of the future includes a new school, a new hospital, and a new stadium for the Barcelona soccer team. That last image caused a passer-by to ask, “Where’s the Emelec stadium?” (Barcelona, from Quito, and Emelec, from Guayaquil, are Ecuador’s two most popular teams, although Deportivo Cuenca, from the country’s third-largest city, is currently in first place.)
Meanwhile, the women’s healing and children’s theatre projects continue. The healing project, with nine women from their thirties to their eighties, had its first healing circle, and is beginning to train them to conduct healing circles. The women are excited and empowered about doing this, says Caravanista Tania Romero, and it’s an opportunity for women to connect and break the isolation in their lives by sharing their stories.
The Teatro del Niños kids, who are 6 to 10, begin intensive rehearsals this week for the performance of Beba en la Isla Nena, which will take place on Sunday, August 22. The production is intended to bring out the kids’ creativity and help them learn about the destructive effects of militarization on the environment. (Ecuador is fairly environmentally conscious; it’s been poor enough so that people don’t waste things, biodegradable plastic bags are commonplace, and one of the country’s biggest political struggles recently has been indigenous people resisting oil-company pollution in the Oriente, the eastern provinces in the Amazon watershed.)
It hasn’t been all work. On Friday, Caravanistas took an ecotour from the nearby town of Morro, riding a motorboat past the coastal mangrove swamps to watch dolphins swim in the estuary and hike on an island where hundreds of fragatas—frigate birds—nest. And on Satuday night, we went to a salsateca by the beach and danced until the cops came to enforce the 3 a.m. closing time.
