NOTE: we're a little behind the curve on this post - it was written a week ago, but with the week of training we just finished, we hadn't had a chance to polish it up. And now, with all the thoughts inspired by IST (in-service training for the non-volunteer and/or acronym impaired), we want to write another post. So you get this one in all of it's unpolished glory. And also a beautiful picture Lena took that has almost nothing to do with the post, except that it has some mothers in it.
A modern invention of the nationalist age and the card-flower industrial complex, Mother’s Day is not celebrated on the same day everywhere. Although May is a big favorite around the world, in Costa Rica (and apparently a small part of Belgium) August 15th is the day. And it is a big day—bigger than in the US. It is a national holiday with a day off granted to state workers and some schools are closed. Sales for presents are high, as in the US, and many businesses consider Mother’s Day as their way to stay in the black until Christmas arrives. Flowers, clothes, perfumes and home appliances are all hyped in advertisements for months ahead of the day – not too different from American tastes, except for the large number of ads attempting to entice you to buy hotpants and short shorts for your sainted mother.
When we were in church on Sunday the 15th, we learned why Costa Rica chose this date. Costa Rica is the longest-lasting democracy in Latin America, yet it does not have church-state separation. The Catholic Church is the official state Church, and the 15th is the feast day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven, where she is crowned the Queen of Heaven by Jesus.
According to some of the teachers we know, there is a tradition of local schools holding big parties for their communities on Mother’s Day. Many schools, overburdened with other, more academic, tasks no longer commit the time and resources required, but my town is an exception. We were asked to help set up and then invited to attend the festivities, and, not realizing what a big deal Mother’s Day is, we did not know what we were getting into.
The first clue that we had no idea how intense this celebration was going to be was that there was a theme: Hawaiian luau. This evening, the town hall was filled with streamers, balloons, and a gigantic welcome sign featuring two large-eyed waifs in grass skirts dancing on an island and wishing the reader a happy Mother’s Day (as a side note: if the creators of Precious Moments were ever to sue for back royalties due to the unauthorized use of their work, just in the province of Puntarenas alone, they would be entitled to billions of dollars in damages). Enough tables and chairs were set up for 100 people, and in the centerpiece was a pineapple, covered with candy that had been speared with toothpicks and then jabbed into the fruit, making an already bizarre-looking fruit that much more surreal. At the front of the room, two large tables were stacked high with ribboned and sparkled loot to be handed out to parents that night through the raffle, because it is written in the constitution of Costa Rica that raffles must be held every three to 15 days.
We were given the task of greeting people, which consisted of a polite buenas tardes, making the person sign in on the appropriate sheet (one for men and one for women), and then giving them a raffle number, a piece of candy, and, finally, draping a plastic lei over their head. We ended up with over 100 people – probably 120 – but at least a quarter of the population of Portalón.
Then the madness began.
Actually, that’s a lie: the madness began while we were signing people in. The LCD projector, sound system, and a computer had been brought over from the school for use as the evening’s AV system. At some point during sign-in, everyone in the room was suddenly startled by a horrible, repetitive car crash sound effect, played at what seemed to be 5000 decibels. One of the teachers had put together a slide show, complete with sound effects and music, of what started out as a series of pictures of unusual car crashes, but which quickly devolved into a series of pictures of morbidly obese people in bikinis and cats in zany situations. This was to set the tone for the rest of the evening.
Next was the first dinámica of the night, which is just the Costa Rica way of saying “embarrassing party game,” in which we were all asked to stand up and dance. Everyone seemed fine with the standing up part, but, when it came to dancing, there weren’t many takers. At this point, the MC began haranguing the crowd over the mic, at great length and at great volume. “COME ON! DANCE! THIS IS FUN! THIS IS A NIGHT TO HAVE FUN! DANCE!” Unmoved, the crowd continued to, for the most part, watch the teachers dance. Then the threats began: “IF YOU DON’T DANCE, YOU WILL HAVE TO COME UP HERE IN FRONT OF EVERYONE AND DO THE CHICKEN DANCE!” Guards were posted throughout the room to identify the non-dancing scofflaws and drag them to the front of the room.
This, of course, is the point in which Nate was dragged up to the front of the room and instructed to do the chicken dance. Not that he hadn’t been dancing before, mind you, but let’s consider the logic: just say you’re running an event. The crowd isn’t really responding, but you feel compelled by some intense, uncontrollable, pathological urge to make them dance. After threatening them with public embarrassment if they don’t dance, you obviously have to follow through, otherwise you lose face and all control over the evening. On the other hand, if you actually force someone to embarrass themselves, you may very well scare everyone away, as they flee your terrifying totalitarian dance party. The answer? Make the gringo dance. Gringos dancing is universally considered to be funny is Latin America. Luckily, Nate has been conditioned by years of high school drama and working with children and is not easily given to embarrassment, and he was a good sport in sating the appetites and curiosity of the party-goers.
The night continued on, sometimes interminably so: at least 4 more dinámicas were done, dinner was served, raffles numbers read until every single adult ticket holder received a present (somewhat defeating the purpose of having a raffle, now that we think about it), and the teachers and hosts for the evening did an amateur dancer number in spandex and luau flowers which involved a lot of booty-shaking at the audience. Some of these women were over 40, and several were not in peak condition, making even Lena look like a swimsuit model. It was one of those situations in which you would be embarrassed for the lot, but since the party was now well into hour 4, all you could do was look on with mild perplexity, hope vaguely that you would not be pulled to the front of the room to shake your white ass, and remind yourself that later you should look into the armchair sociologist theory that one culture’s shame is another culture’s entertainment. And then smile wanly, knowing it was important for the guest gringo to seem to be having a good time.
But the real high point of the evening was yet to come. It involved the enactment of a skit claiming, as stated in the introduction, to represent a “typical Costa Rican family situation.” The plot was simple: a busty and booty-heavy Costa Rican housewife works hard to do the housework and feed her family. Her wayward and shallow husband goes out drinking at the local cantina, picks up slutty women, and comes home drunk. The wife kicks him out but he returns to repent. Harmony is restored when she, and her two daughters, forgive all. Now, we actually found this particular celebration of motherhood to be entirely depressing, but it was probably the most popular event of the night (other than the free stuff from the raffle). It relied on that well-worn trope of community theatre everywhere: put the most well-known town leaders into wigs, use pillows for potbellies and balloons for boobs, and watch the audience erupt in laughter. Despite the light-heartedness of this skit, Lena had a hard time seeing anything other than an almost entirely negative depiction of a rural woman’s life. They say good comedy tells the truth, and maybe that’s why so many women, as well as men, were laughing.
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