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 Carnival started Saturday here in Bolivia with the parade, dancing and festivities in Oruro. It will build — Monday and Tuesday being holidays — before ending on Ash Wednesday.
In Bolivia, water is the most important element of carnival (along with the beer and being completely intoxicated). Kids throw water baloons at cars or squirt super soakers at one another. Teenage boys chase teenage girls with water baloons (leading one to think that the only thing worse for a youngster than being chased with a water baloon is to not be chased with a water baloon).
At the parades in the major cites, things go from being playful to being an explosion of water, foam shot from cans, and paint and dye.
In Cochabamba people wear rain coats when going out to avoid being soaked. Here in Santa Cruz, they have special coverings, worn over their normal clothes, to avoid having clothes become stained by the dyes. As with teenage girls, one gets the impression that to have been stained different colors from various water baloons and water pistols just shows how popular one is. Being stained can be a bother, but is better than not being stained at all.
 Why are more people not shocked that the George W. Bush administration out-did the Gestapo in their torture methods? This is all so very sad.
“Verschärfte Vernehmung” – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.
 My blog has a new look! (In Latin American Spanish su look is your appearance, your style.)
I had been using Google’s Blogger service, but they have no real way to update blogs remotely — and since my computer is still broken this became a real concern. Consequently, I installed WordPress and have brought the blog back to my site. The contents are the same, the direccion (blog.jmc.me) is the same, only the platform is new.
 I have been out of touch, but I have an excuse. Just before Christmas, my computer died. When I hit the power switch, there was a click but then nothing. I took it to an Apple tech in Santa Cruz just after Christmas, and he said it was probably the motherboard. He’d have Apple FedEx one down. “Great,” I thought.
So, I waited. And waited. And waited.
The latest word is that the part is in La Paz, but that since the beginning of the year the customs folks there have been updating their procedures and so not much is getting through.
It’s been over a month now, and still no word about when I might get my computer back.
 I went down this morning to visit the bishop emeritus of Camiri, Bolivia, who is slowly dying. He is 75 and turned over his apostolic vicariate (like a diocese) to the new bishop about a month ago. It seems like only a short time ago that I’d see him wheeling around Camiri in his pickup truck, always wearing his Franciscan habit.
But, like the runner struggling to get to the finish line and then collapsing, he started to get serious ill as the October handover of the vicariate got closer. After becoming the retired bishop, he seems to be quickly fading away. He refuses to go up to Santa Cruz (four or five hours north of us) despite the fact that there are better medical facilities there. He seems determined to pass away in his old diocese among his people.
Growing up the States, I had little contact with death. Since time immortal, people have grown old and died at home among their own. For whatever reasons, this is not the reality in the United States today. We have little contact with the elderly, and death is a sanitized process. Funeral homes are tucked back from the street with heavily curtained windows. One doesn’t see people die or see corpses, except for carefully prepared bodies laid out for a few minutes at a viewing.
When I became a friar, this quickly changed. For one thing, friars are frequently called upon when death is near or has arrived. We tend to see people at this important time in their lives. Also, the elderly friars are more present within the friar community than are elderly in the society at large.
And, I came to work in Latin America. Here, seniors live and die at home with their families. People are used to death. It is still a sad thing, but it is not an unknown, terrifying thing. Funeral homes are on the street with other stores, with caskets sitting on display in the window. There are a selection of adult caskets, and a stack of smaller caskets for children and babies.
A Bolivian friend once asked me, “Do you what what the difference is between us and you?”
“No,” I told him (assuming he was using the plural you). “Tell me.”
“We’re not afraid to die,” he told me, “and you are.”
Death, in the U.S., is usually a mistake (the doctor did something wrong, the person didn’t take care of themselves, etc.) or else we’re still searching for a cure. It is part of the American psyche that we think that if we do enough, we can keep bad things from happening. With enough metal detectors and making everyone take off their shoes, we can prevent another terrorist attack. With enough medicine, we can delay death forever. That, and the remoteness of the elderly and the sanitized funerals, makes death something unreal. It becomes something frightening. It ceases to be something which will one day visit us and everyone we know.
In the words of the country song by Kenny Chesney:
Everybody wanna go to heaven
Hallelujah, let me hear you shout
Everybody wanna go to heaven
But nobody wanna go now
St. Francis of Assisi, in his well-known song, The Canticle of the Creatures, referred to the whole of creation as our brothers and sisters — referring, for example, to the sun and moon as “Brother Sun” and “Sister Moon.” Shortly before his own death, he added a new verse to the song:
Praised be You, my Lord through Sister Death,
from whom no-one living can escape.
His Sister Death will soon visit Monseñor Leonardo Bernachi, OFM, and he seems to be peacefully awaiting her visit. Please remember him in your prayers.
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Carnival started Saturday here in Bolivia with the parade, dancing and festivities in Oruro. It will build — Monday and Tuesday being holidays — before ending on Ash Wednesday.
