Tar and feathers

January 31, 2008

There are spiders in the microwave. I draw the line. There is something about webs and little crawly things in the food heater that just doesn’t appeal to me. I’ve become immune to the little ants that crawel over me and my keyboard as I’m typing, I’ve succumbed to cleaning up the detested termite alas de muerte (wings of death), and I’ve gotten used to sleeping on my sandpaper sheets. But, I will not clean arachnids from the microwave. Not that I can’t mind you, I just don’t want to and that’s that.

I feel like a mosquito is buzzing in my brain. It’s bouncing around in the dark and empty crevices of my cranium looking for a way out. But no, it’s just the helicopter about 50 ft from my head. I live across the street from Alas de Socorro (wings of mercy). These are the mission aviation flights that bring tribal members from deep in the jungle to the hospital. Usually the airport kick’s in about 7am in the morning and is active until about 7pm at night. For some reason they sound like they’re trying out a new engine at 10pm in the evening. And it’s not a quiet one. They’re not installing the whisper lite that’s for sure.

And now for the local news. The phone system is once again up and running and Carnivale is looming. This is basically a nationwide waterfight. For some reason they have a national holiday where the object is to get everyone wet. It had already started last week. When I was on the bus coming back from my weekend in Napo, we had a very large tub of water thrown at us. It managed to enter the bus at a midway window, projectile through the aisle, and land on me in the very last seat. Apparently another game is to throw oil at someone and then douse them with flour. A kind of tar and feather act. I even heard that some unlucky folks get urine dumped on them. So you see the Ecuadorians are creative. It sounds like any liquid substance is fair game.