This morning there is a Christmas concert in progress across the Rio Tomebamba, in Cuenca, Ecuador.
Two young boys have decided they aren’t going to walk up or down the river to either of the bridges to cross so they roll up pant legs, leave tennis shoes on, grab sticks for support, and cross the river with only a few rocks to balance on.
When they see me they wave.
The voices of the choir gives them a heavenly send off.
Catching these moments is like catching butterflies with holes in your net.
By the New Cathedral, on a cloudy afternoon, these performers stand motionless.
Then, they move and beckon to a little girl to pose for a photo with them with her mom. After the photo, they blow them a parting kiss and return to their rigid pose. They work for tips, depending on generosity to fill the bowl on the ground at their feet.
What is unseen is that this little girl, twice earlier, walked to the bowl, bent down to take a ten dollar bill until her mother called her back.
I should have left coins.
Temptation, especially for kids, is never far away, and succumbing is all too human.
Ronald doesn’t mind getting photographed. Just five minutes ago, two kids sat next to the icon eating fries and sipping Coca Cola.
How is it that a clown can become the most famous person in the world?
Ronald’s only resume is red hair, crazy colored clothes, clown shoes, and a continual smile.
In a city like this with hundreds of bronze statues of military men, conquerors,artists, writers, and churchmen, how can Ronald be so comfortable with himself?
It seems time to run Ronald for President in 2016.
We have puppets in office, but electing a puppet, who doesn’t pretend to be something he isn’t, would be the most honest thing we have done in years.
Ecuador has a new changing young generation.
A still small number of its children have adopted the music, talk, style of other big city children around the world. There is graffiti in Cuenca. You see some tattoos, some ear piercings and dyed hair, torn levi’s with holes in them, a liking to turn raucous rap way way up.
At a Gazebo in Parque Calderone, where adult protesters recently yelled against government tyranny, these kids are peacefully practicing dance moves. Each individual on the stage has his own routine, his own steps, his own personality.
Ecuador is a country where you watch young people taking the arm of mom or grand mom as they walk down a bumpy sidewalk. It is a country where older men, and women, still wear traditional attire of their village, bright skirts, black hats, braided hair, stoic looks.
This new generation moves us into new times with a few bumps and grinds..
There are, however, worse things these kids could be doing than dancing in the park on a Monday night.
If only all generational change were this easy.
We don’t see any other monkeys on this trip.
More might be here, but this is the only one who is tame enough and smart enough to meet the boat, take food from us tourists, and entertain for his bread and butter. He is a spider monkey and almost as cute as the little girl who feeds him lunch from the bow of our boat.
Monkeys are always a big draw.
Some say they are our cousins. Some like to watch them climb. Monkey’s are inquisitive, territorial and social. There is no one that doesn’t watch this monkey business.
Shariah is happy.
She gets to feed the monkey and be on stage at the same time.
In San Pedro Town this afternoon, after school, a couple of boys come up with their own game. Tarzan’s jungle can be any place on the planet as long as there is a little boy who puts two and two together.
One of the boys grabs one end of a dangling palm branch, holds on, then swings himself out over the beach and water and back to dry land. The branch might break and send him crashing but it is a risk worth taking.
While he swings, the other boy waits his turn.
A couple of girls, outside the picture, shake their heads and call the boy’s crazy.
And, we are.
Kids go to school to learn, all over the world.
This Monday morning is a new week at a local primary school. Some kids, I observe, are smiling while others are not overjoyed, but most children all over the world go to school where they grow up and are introduced to what is necessary and proper to become functioning adults.
Cursory research states that 2/3 of the population of Belize are teens or younger, education is compulsory to 14 years, 70% of the teachers have professional training , a sizable minority of children don’t go past primary school. The best schools are run by the Catholic church who, some say, should never be allowed around kids.
Education opens futures for people, but the future here favors well financed foreigners with MBA’s who take calculated risks, have financing, study trends, and use money to make money.
Poverty, limited finances, and lack of education are all legs of the same creaky stool that keeps people depressed for a lifetime.
These kids, from where this ex teacher sits, look content,are sent to school with backpacks, a clean uniform, and, hopefully, homework done last night before bed.
While school tries its best to civilize them, there is little doubt that parents are still the prime reason behind kid’s early success or failure.
Those kids who succeed here, at this school, will stay in school longer and won’t stay on this island long.
In a world economy, good jobs seem to naturally go to the most skilled.
This morning, on a walk to the Sir Barry Bowen Bridge that separates north from south Ambergris Caye, I am still in San Pedro Town and take shelter in a bus stand because rain is moving in with dark clouds behind it.
San Pedro Town is in the center of Ambergris Caye in the Caribbean Sea, south of Mexico and east of Guatamala.
As you walk south, away from town, you run into Mahogany Bay Village, an upper end real estate development with a hotel option, custom townhouses, and a three stage development plan starting in the low two hundred thousand U.S. dollar range. As you cross the bridge north you run into the Akbol Yoga Retreat, and further along the road, Captain Morgan’s Casino and Resort.
The land, either north or south from San Pedro Town, is not much higher than the sea. Running parallel to the main paved roads is marshland, lagoons, scrubby trees and tangled roots.
Standing in the shelter with me, three children adjust their trash bag raincoats and talk. The biggest of the three is an older sister who directs her siblings like her mother taught her to do.
Guatemala, to the west, is even poorer than Belize, and Nicaragua is even poorer than Guatemala. The chances these girls will become pregnant and have three kids before they are 21 are large.
As the morning rain abates, the girls leave the bus stand and walk back towards town. I wait for the rain to really stop, not in any hurry.
On an island, you quickly come to the end of the road no matter which direction you go or how fast you travel.
How many kids can’t change their future because no one tells them what their future will be if they don’t change?
There aren’t many rides on this Midway but those that are here give kids a thrill.
Precious children are flung through space, turned upside down, and hold on screaming for dear life.
This circus has an old time Ferris Wheel. There is the Hammer and the Swinger, the Fun Slide, Mad Hatter Tea Cups, a Spinning Wheel, and a Fun House. Families buy ride coupons at small booths and hand them to scruffy men or tall lean teenagers wearing John Deere ball caps. They wait in lines for a ride to finish and then are loaded into seats, baskets, or capsules like bullets into a chamber.
The amusement area at the Punkin Chunkin Festival is a maze of pipes, high voltage electric cables, gears, pulleys, wheels, wire cages and seats, sounds of straining engines, lights, chain link fences to keep people going the correct direction. Machinery is always looking to grab hands in the wrong places.
Parents take pictures of their offspring spinning through the air, rushing down a long slide sitting on burlap bags, spinning in tea cups, or locked inside a metal cage that keeps them from falling when they are upside down twenty feet in the air twisting like a dust devil.
In old days the circus had elephants, animal acts, bearded ladies, carnie games, clowns and dancing girls. The circus has shrunk, almost vanished.
You don’t need a tattooed lady when women in the crowd have tattoos of their own inked in public and private places.
Video games have become our new Ferris Wheel.
Music is accessible.
You can be wearing a tuxedo and tails, coveralls, golf shorts, uniforms, diapers, or your birthday suit, and it sounds great. You can be wearing a wedding dress, a pearl necklace, spiked heels, a flimsy cocktail party dress, cowboy boots, turquoise earrings or a bikini and it sounds great. You can be white haired, bald, or a long hair and enjoy. You do not need to know how to read or write to get the rhythm right.
This afternoon a little girl stands in front of the Band with her father’s approving look and does an impromptu dance.
She can do worse than hang out with serious musicians wearing suits and swinging with intent.
There is her future ahead.
Possibly she will fall in love with a man who fits her and walk down the aisle with her father holding her arm to be given, with her father’s blessing, to a lucky guy? Possibly she will have happy children and a family? Maybe she will fall into a career that fits her abilities and interests?
This afternoon the band plays and people move into and out of the picture. Some tarry. Some show appreciation. Others barrel through the moment like ordnance in World War 1. Some try to avoid the camera.
Music speaks across place, time, people and ideology – in its own voice.
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