Futbol nuevamente

I haven't had the chance to mention that Tolte is hosting a futbol championship of teams from Tolte and the neighboring villages. the game they are playing isn't actually futbol, but "indor," which is payed in the village plazas, which are about one-quarter the size of an actual soccer field. Teams include six players per side, and action and scoring are greatly accelerated compared to true futbol. Scores of 10-6 or so are pretty common. The payers are so densely packed that it can be difficult to sort out the action, but some of the players show an incredible ability to move with the ball over the concrete surface, where the ball moves a lot more quickly than it does on grass.

One of the teams, Los Vecinos, is composed of many of the same players as the Tolte travelling team mentioned in previous blogs, though that team is spread out among four or five teams playing in the tournament. In any case, Sunday night turned out to be the night for Los Vecinos to celebrate their victory, along with some players from the other teams. As usual, frightening amounts of beer were consumed, but that wasn't the worst of it. In the course of the afternoon, Joaquin and I went to Chunchi. he had some errands to run, and invited me along for the ride. One of the errands was to find a place selling homemade trago, moonshine made from sugar cane. In the end, he found one, but asked me to carry the bottle (probably for fear of what his wife and family might say). In the end, I not only wound up with the bottle, but the bottle became the group possession of the futbolistas.

How can I describe what this stuff tasted like? I have had other homemade tragos, and they range from pretty bad to pretty good. But if I tell you that this stuff tasted like turpentine, I might not be conveying the full horror of what we were drinking (washed down with beer, of course). Fortunately, they all had a tremendous head start on me, or I might not have survived. Everyone did his best to break out whatever English he knew, and it was all pretty entertaining, until it was time to go home.

because I have helped to carry some of these boys home before, I got roped into doing it again. But this wasn't the one at a time trip of the previous event, but sort of a mass migration uphill to the vecinario the Vecinos come from. And during this migration, one of them decided that what he really needed to do was fight with his cousin.

I don't know if I have described this cousin before, but his name is William (or maybe Alfonso or Patricio, code name Pato). He's short, in the way one expects Ecuadorians to be, but is so powerful that, like the young Arnold Schwarznegger, he "has muscles in his face," to quote someone I knew long ago. He's an incredible athlete, definitely one of the stars of the futbol team, and not someone to start a fight with. Except that he was incredibly drunk and didn't feel like fighting. which his cousin Gonzalo absolutely did.

I'm not a brave man. It's just that simple. But somehow, keeping these two guys apart suddenly became incredibly important to me (maybe because of my own level of inebriation, though I wasn't as far gone as most). Maybe it was the high school teacher in me emerging in an alien environment. And that's how I found myself both trying to hold William back and get him home, which required going forward. This is comparable to trying to stop a HumVee by holding on to the bumper.

Fortunately, another futbolista named Cristian (an easy-going soul, maybe a bit more grown-up than the rest) also got involved in holding Gonzalo back. Otherwise we never would have gotten anywhere. But I wound up in the middle of things more than once, and was lucky to escape with a scraped knee and a scratch under my right eye. Not bad, considering. And Gonzalo and William got home largely uninjured, which was a real miracle. I guess that puts the "peace" in Peace Corps. Of course, all my students noticed the scratch under my eye this morning, because the brawl was the biggest news to hit Tolte since the brawls of last year's fiestas. These fiestas are coming around again in about three weeks, and I guess there will be more of this kind of thing, but worse, so I'm going to try to take my leave earlier. Happy Dia de San Marcial to all.

But I did wonder, as I walked home and went to bed, am I braver than I thought? Was I just heedless, so that I didn't have time to overcome any fears? After all, I didn't stop to consider whether anyone was armed (no one was). Or was I motivated by the idea that William trusted me to get him home? If I knew what to conclude, I suppose there would be the chance to learn something about myself from this, which is why a person takes a job teaching in Ecuador for $360 a month. But I'm sort of mystified, myself.