June 24 in Bolivia is the festival of San Juan and is in general considered the coldest day of the year, despite the winter solstice being on the 21st of June. Well first of all I can tell you that it was NOT the coldest day of the year, but that’s a whole other story. San Juan is celebrated in some parts of Bolivia, including Hárdeman, with campfires outside of everyone’s house and then at midnight the tradition is to walk across the hot coals of the fire. According to “legend” if you do it right at midnight, the coals will not burn you. Well, as you can imagine, I had my doubts. I was out pasear-ing around town that night and noticed my friend Ana María getting ready to start a fire outside of her house, so I stopped in to share since my family didn’t look like they were going to make a fire. Turns out Ana’s family was burning all their clothes they had worn out or grown out of that year…which I found kind of strange but whatever. There haven’t been too many times in Bolivia when I’ve had the chance to sit around a campfire just for the sake of sitting around a campfire, so I was certainly enjoying it. I tried to tell Ana some stories of the Ranzaganza, but I don’t think she really understood why I was so entertained by cardboard cut-outs or throwing a vortex football at the backsides of my cousins. Anyway, I was enjoying the fire but as midnight approached we headed over to the youth center where they were electing “Miss San Juan,” the queen of the festival. The pageant was already underway when we got in, which I was happy about because they usually “honor” me with asking me to be a judge, which would be ok if the contestants weren’t ranging from 6th to 11th grade. It was quite un-nerving to watch these young girls parade up and down a makeshift catwalk while their parents and hosts of other old men watched and whistled and hooted. But, at least the oldest girl won…I think she’s 16. Here is a picture of the her (she’s on the left, named Lucero) Ana and me:
Then we went outside to where a fire had been burning for a few hours to walk on the hot coals. Here is a shot of Ana making her way across:
It took a couple of minutes of deciding as well as Ana calling me a sissy before I decided to do it, but I finally did and did not in fact get burned. Since not everyone in the campo gets digital cameras that well, here’s how the picture turned out:
Yeah I know you can’t see me at all but I wanted to put it up to show the creepy flaming cross that came out instead…can you see it? I thought it was pretty cool. I showed it to some of the folks watching and even got a pretty big laugh out of one of our nuns Madre Gracia by telling her it came out that way because I played Jesus at Easter. You can imagine how proud I was to have made an Italian nun laugh in a language that was neither my first nor her first.
I don’t think I need to tell you that there is nothing magical going on here. Yeah, the coals were hot, but they spread them out over an area where the fire had not been burning, so they weren’t as hot as they could be. Plus the bottoms of your feet are pretty tough…well at least mine are from living in the campo for a year. They maintained that it was the magic of San Juan, even after I pointed out that it was like 12:10 when we did it, but what the heck, it was fun.
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