Carnival

In South American, Carnival is held every February! Following is the description in one of the visitors guide.

"If you don’t mind getting a bit soaked, the February Carnival celebrations in Peru are celebrated throughout Peru with significant fanfare and revelry. During the Peru Carnival, perfect strangers soak each other with water, most often in the form of water balloons and water guns. It is not rare to find yourself the aim of such a liquid assault, and getting mad about it won’t help any, so the idea is to go with the flow, quite literally."

We have been a witness – but not attacked! Children will fill water balloons and stand on top of the roofs of their houses, and drop the balloons down on passersby. It is rumored, that those who think it is funny may fill the balloons with other liquids (paint, oil, urine) etc. However, we have never seen any of that.

Children in a neighborhood will also gather in the streets with their ammunition of balloons, water guns and buckets of water, and choose up sides to pelt each other much like the children in North America do in a snowball fight. Everyone is thrilled to get involved because it is summer, very hot, and water play always has a cooling effect.

We were at Hope House when the girls held “carnival” this year. It was a time of fun and frolic! We were sitting on a stairway in the shade. I was not feeling well. We did not participate. However, we fully enjoyed the whole thing. The girls were so very excited. They had their buckets of balloons and extra water, liter bottles with whole punctured in the tops, and they were anticipating a good time. It was nice to sit and watch them and their interaction although it did get a little rough. We only felt a light spray of water droplets a couple of times and I must admit it was very refreshing. The buckets were soon empty and everyone was wet from top to bottom! Don and I moved inside as the carnival appeared to be over. Not! The girls just left the scene of the water play to refuel. Soon it became a travelling troupe and the water attacks were on the very steps where we were safely away from the previous play. The laughter was non-stop as was the squealing and hoorays! You can imagine the pitch of the voices of 14 teenager girls when they either successfully soaked a sister, or when she was able to dodge their water balloon hand grenade. Dodging them was the plan at first, but soon after it was cool to get doused! Of course, there are no losers in this game. Everyone’s a winner, and that’s what makes it so much fun.

I’m not so sure “carnival” would be fun for those who are perfect strangers walking down the street as the original game was played. But, when friends and family get together to have a water fight, it is good old fashioned fun. Something we seem to forget in America. Talking to our parents, or grandparents, I’m thinking there was an element of that kind of fun in their childhood. Why not select a country, and one of it’s fun traditions, research foods from that country, look up some names of missionaries in that location and have a day with your family celebrating together. For instance, if you chose Peru, this carnival could be a tradition you could adopt, rice and chicken are standard fare here, and we happen to know someone you could pray for!