Fiesta Patronal

So it seems that almost every town or community has a patron saint and once a year the community, no matter how small, gets together to celebrate. It's something like celebrating the founding of the community each year. The celebrations entail a weekend of partying but also some pretty cool traditional activities. All of which would actually be ridiculously fun if we did them in the US.

Activities we should adopt from Paraguay:

1. Fire Soccer. (almost as awesome as you are thinking)

1. Tie together and bunch several old rags into a self sustaining ball. Metal wire can be used to ensure the ball shape is maintained. Or take old soccer balls.

2. Soak the balls in Kerosene.

3. Wait till night time, light the ball up and proceed to play soccer with flaming balls of destruction.

4. Stop playing soccer and spend full effort trying to peg your friends.

What it looks like.

What it feels like.

2. Flaming bull

This tradition involves building a small tent like structure and attaching an old cow or bull skull to its front. Hard to describe, easy to show. 

This is fellow volunteer, Taylor Schrang utilizing the bull.
Notice the flaming horns, again more kerosene rags.

The basic objective is to chase people like a scene from a really low budget horror movie although watching a burning cow skull rushing at you is indeed a distinctly frightening experience. 

I tried to take a picture of a dude running with the bull. He charged me. This is the photo I got.

3. Climb the pole.

The community takes a long tree trunk, covers it in grease and nails a bag to one end of the trunk. The bag usually contains a reasonable sum of money and maybe a bottle of booze. Then the trunk is put into as deep hole so it stands around 20 feet high into the air with the money and booze at the top.

The point is to get to the top. 

Normally this activity wouldn't enthuse me so much but its similarity to the pole climbing challenge in the Mulan movie made it seem awesome to me. 

Oh and in terms of safety precautions from falling.... well there arnt any so its got the whole "just be a man and do it" vibe.. Hardcore.


All in all a fun time. Until next time...