Ransa

I have come to a point in my Peace Corps service where everything is starting to feel normal, mundane even. Project seems to get going along, slowly but steadily. I have learned to think in a matter of weeks and months rather than the American mentality of minutes and hours. As I go along my merry way designing projects, making plans, going down to the coast every now and again in order to reconnect with the outside world. Everything seems so normal at times that I even forget to write about anything because I feel as if I am so engrained into my life here that there is no longer a concept of America. That is until I go to wash my clothing one-day and there is a cow ear piercing celebration. These are the moments that I remember that I am in fact not in America.

Now I don’t know how many of you have ever been fortunate enough to attend a cow ear piercing celebration, but it is the weirdest shit I have ever seen in my life. Also it would not rank up there with PETA’s top 10 activities to do with animals. To give you a lovely picture of the celebration there are women dressed in colorful clothing paying the drums and singing in Quetcha. The family that owns the cows dancing around with white flags that have the family’s initials written on them in what appears to be blood. The air is filled with the aromatic scent of burning bosta (dried cow shit) and a thick layer of smoke hangs in the air.

All of the cows are herded into a coral where over a series of hours and an ever-excessive amount of beer they have their ears pierced, ribbon put through it, their horn sawed down and finally are branded. It may or may not be one of the most disturbing yet entertaining things I have ever seen, and I have seen a little kid get diarrhea on my doorstep.

To start of the ceremony there were two baby vacas placed together on their sides in a marriage of sorts. They were adored with necklaces and baby powder. The family sang and danced around them while the young cows tired fruitlessly to escape. To finish off the ceremony they had a cloth with oranges, caramelos and bebidas placed on top of them for one final carnation. Finally the food was thrown into the crowd, I don’t know about you I don’t think I would want to eat food thrown into an animal coral. Oddly my ideas that eating food dropped in dried cow shit could make you sick did not effect many of the kids, I actually saw a young kid pick up an animal cracker off of the floor of the coral. I can only imagine that stomach infection.

As if cows’ getting married was not weird enough, cows being individually for all intents and purposes hunted down by progressively drunker men followed it. Now this part was clearly the most entertaining part because quite often the men were unsuccessful in catching the cow the first time. The attempts to catch a cow consisted of one man running after the cow and grabbing on to its hide and then running and leaping to catch up with it. He would run for as long as he could with the cow, hopefully eventually being assisted by other men to trap and stop the cow. One cow was particularly crafty and managed to ram my auxiliar (Assistant principle) into a pole in order to stave off ear piercing for at least 20 more minutes. As the afternoon wore on and the men became increasingly intoxicated the gathering of the cows became more absurd. At one point my nurse got very concerned that there would be a large number of stitches in her near future.

After a cow was captured the next step was to calm it down enough to stick scissors or a knife into its ears and then place ribbon through its ears and tie it the ribbon. After the first cow had its ears pierced family that owned the cows placed the blood of the cows on their cheeks like war paint. Yes cows blood as war paint. Not your typical Thursday afternoon.

After the cows had their ears pierced my host father proceeded to run over with a saw, which I’m pretty sure I have seen him use to cut both lamb and metal, healthy combination, to saw off the top 2 inches of the cows horns. A myth exists that if you don’t cut off the horns the cow wont grow. Naturally. Anyways this was a particularly gross part of the ceremony because they didn’t always get the horn sawed off the first time, especially towards the end of the ceremony. There was one poor unfortunate cow I was pretty convinced was going to die of blood loss because the horn cutting was so unsuccessful.

I know you are all wondering what they did with the tips of the horns, don’t worry they kept them, “Para la Mesa,” a duh. For those of you that don’t speak Spanish that means for the table. I’m not so sure if that mean there is a special cow horn table or if it is used like a thanksgiving cornucopia as a dining table centerpiece. Either way I don’t think I want to know.

To cap off the whole glorious ceremony the cow was branded. The men would stand around the recently pierced and cut cow shouting “FUEGO! FUEGO!” until a man on the other side of the coral ran over with the branding tool. His run was more of a drunken leap than a run and I became thoroughly convinced that he was going to accidently brand one of the young kids he was running past. But that is probably my own neurosis. Finally in true Peruvian fashion there was a parade at the end to herd the cows off to the chacra. During the parade the family was throwing caramelos into the crowd running after the newly debilitated cows. I have to say it was particularly funny to see 50-year-old mothers and grandmothers running alongside young children in the hopes of picking up free candies.

Its times like these that I remember I am in a totally different world. The everyday here can seem so mundane that I have lost my concept of what is normal and what is odd. I have become used to small talk and now say “aca pues” when someone asks me what’s up. That roughly translates to “well, here” something I would have never even thought to say stateside. Even though things can seem routine and ordinary here there is always something, something from left field, completely unimaginable, that manages to shake me back into the reality that I am an outsider looking in and have no fucking clue what is going on.