This one´s about the music

6.22

I´m sitting on the floor, next to the kitchen at the church. I feel coldness from the freshly soaked floor as the concrete absorbs most of the moisture from the ground. I feel a cool breeze from the escaping rains, I see the clouds, slowly and perhaps reluctantly, allowing the mountains to appear from the distance. I think we´ll be as lucky to have sunshine too.

I am here this morning to integrate in the community by listening to an hour or more of non-stop Evangelist songs sung in kichwa. The group of women that sing for the church are varied, a few young girls, mothers of five, and a few older women who stand in the back. The women are practicing for a contest of sorts, I actually do not really understand why they are practicing at this time... as they practice every Tuesday night as well. But nevertheless, today, they are practicing with the aide of a DVD player that was miraculously dragged out to demonstrate how other kichwa communities display their singing with dance. However, for my mama´s its ridiculously hard for them to dance in rhythm, apparently the Evangelists don´t shake their booties at fiestas as much as the Catholics do... I feel like the age difference renders some sort of unspoken shyness...
Their music is sung with very high pitched women´s voices, almost screeching (when you first hear it). The musical instruments play a very repetitive, non-climatic tone that seems to repeat itself a 1000x over. It even sounds like they are playing the music purposefully off beat or in un-tuned sequences. But, after listening to this type of music for almost two months I have almost grown accustomed to it, to the point of enjoyment! It´s something that has definitely blindsided me, I never had the slightest idea what I had gotten myself into when they first invited me to church. I remeber when I first heard them sing, I almost started to laugh! I wasn´t sure if they were serious or not...and let me tell you, they sure are!!
I never wrote about the women´s meeting that we had two weeks ago. It pretty much went phenomenal in my opinion, and I have to say that they seemed really into it. The meeting was set up for 3 o´clock, but of course in Ecuadorian time that means 4-4:30ish... it´s like some unspoken Ecuadorian campo rule, to know that the meeting does not start for at least another hour or so after the designated time. So anyway, almost thirty women were present by the end of the meeting, which was a really good turn out for me. Before the meeting I had prepared posters and hung them around the room to introduce myself with family pictures and others to outline my ideas and goals. Finally the last paper was one for them to fill out in terms of what they wanted accomplished and what strenghts they felt they had as a community. I ended up speaking for about 25 minutes which followed with them speaking to eachother in kichwa, addressing me with gracious words, and more of their dialoguing amongst eachother. Hey, I even received a round of applause after the meeting!!! :)