san juan dice que si

Over the last month, communities all over Paraguay celebrated the annual festival of San Juan - an incredibly interesting and fiery event, the history of which I have had some difficulty researching. Neither the saint nor the holiday are mentioned in much detail under Wikipedia's 'Paraguay' entry (I even checked Wiki en espanol), although it seems to be a very prominent holiday here. When I conducted a google search, the first two hits mentioned non-Paraguayan San Juan festivals, and the third hit was the Amigos website reporting that the volunteers were celebrating the festival with their host families. Yup.

As it turns out, however, the festival of San Juan is not unique to Paraguay. It has its origin in southern Spain, where it is still celebrated in a similar fashion. Namely, in honor of the summer solstice, people come out in droves to set fire to effigies of politicians, light fireworks, and burn anything else they can think of. One of the favorite games at a Paraguayan San Juan party is the "pelota tata", which is basically a normal game of soccer except that the ball is on fire (tata is the Guarani word for fire). The volunteers had a great time with this one. Here's a random picture I found of someone playing pelota-tata.
Other notable celebratory activities:
- A game Ari and Drew described to me as a "ring of tata" that they jumped through for a thrill. I wasn't pleased.
- A comical re-enactment of a wedding in which Julia and Katie participated. Katie was the bride and Julia was a policeman. The other characters were a priest, the groom, and a pregnant woman who interrupted the ceremony to announce that the groom was her baby's father. Neither of the girls completely understood the tradition, but they were told it was enacted to recall the period in Paraguayan history after the War of the Triple Alliance. This war took a huge toll on the population of Paraguay, reducing the number of living males to 10% of what it had been. I would have felt a bit nervous laughing at such a scene, but I suppose its one way to deal with the painful history of that war.