Catholicism | Stowaway Travel Writing & Editorial Services

Or Mardi Gras, or Shrove Tuesday, or so on. Today’s a Christian holiday, the last day of festivities before the solemn season of Lent starts. It’s celebrated in various ways in various countries: in England, it’s sometimes “Pancake Tuesday” because people eat pancakes for dinner, from back when they needed to use up all the fat in the house before the lean 40 days of Lent; in France and French-influenced places like New Orleans, Mardi Gras, or “Fat Tuesday,” is a time of partying and fatty foods; in Italy and Brazil, “Carnaval,” from the Latin for “remove the meat” (which is what pious Catholics do until Easter), is a time of masked parties, exuberant dancing, and wild abandon.

Part of the Carnaval parade in Baños, Ecuador

In the Andes highlands of Ecuador, Carnaval combines Catholic traditions with indigenous ones, so people party but also hope for a good harvest and good luck in the coming year. One Ecuadorian tradition is to throw water at friends and family, and sometimes at strangers on the street. Some people also throw flour and even eggs. This comes from an indigenous festival that pre-dates the arrival of Europeans to the continent. I’ve seen guys douse their girlfriends with buckets of cold water, and little kids squirting each other with water guns.

Foamed!

But nowadays the popular thing is to use tall spray cans of foam. So any time you hear that little rattling noise that a spray can makes when you shake it, look out! Someone’s gonna foam you. I feared I might be a special target, as a gringa, but mostly people seem to target their friends. I did get foamed when I went out Sunday night, but so did every other girl who walked by that corner, and it was easy to laugh it off as I headed to the bar.

Taita Carnaval is a symbolic character who arrives from out of town, bringing good luck and food to clean and industrious homes, and letting his sidekick Hunger linger in dirty households. I didn’t see Taita Carnaval this year, but I did catch a parade in Baños, a small town in the shadow of an active volcano. I took some shaky video and stitched it together in a little movie. I hope you enjoy this glimpse of how one town celebrates this holiday!

The Good

The Illinois legislature has passed a bill approving civil unions. Governor Quinn is expected to sign it into law by the end of the year. Hurrah Illinois! One step closer to actual equality for LGBTs.

The Pope has made a tiny concession to people who use condoms — they may no longer be headed straight to hell! Baby steps, I guess, although as tigtog points out, there are a lot more steps to go toward making the Catholic Church the loving kind of body it purports to be for members and non-members alike.

This news is very late, but Aung San Suu Kyi has been released from her house arrest in Burma. That Feministing article has links to her speech, which is definitely worth checking out. This woman is a human rights hero and has been a vocal activist for decades, not to mention a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Amnesty International has been advocating for her release for years. Congratulations and I wish her a safe and productive future.

The Bad

Instead of extended unemployment benefits as they usually do, members of Congress have got into the Grinchy spirit and stalled in partisan politics. A lot of people are going to lose their homes (aren’t we done with that yet?) and more from this.

It’s no secret that the intersectionality of identities and abuses based on those identities is a huge part of the discussion of human rights among contemporary social justice groups. Being black isn’t worse or better than being a woman, and vice versa, for example. Unfortunately, mainstream organizations and the government haven’t caught on to this idea yet, and so it is that one group’s needs is determined as less important than another’s. This kind of bargaining is what resulted in black women’s concerns being shunted aside in the 2nd wave of the feminist movement, and it’s what makes many civil rights historians look at the civil rights movement from one angle only, instead of taking into account women’s particular experiences. This great article takes a quick look at how many white men raped and abused black women, and how recent attempts to rectify past wrongs do not allow for pursuing justice in those cases. Also, check it out — Rosa Parks was the main NAACP investigator in the case study presented in the article. Rosa Parks did an awful lot of amazing things!

The Silly

Sessily sent me this cool link: posters made up of the text of a book! I don’t see any book on there that I want in poster form, although The Wizard of Oz and Moby-Dick look really cool. I think an Ursula K. LeGuin novel would be great — Shevek boarding the spaceship in The Dispossessed or just about any scene from the Earthsea series.

http://www.thegrio.com/black-history/how-abuse-of-women-was-overshadowed-in-civil-rights-movement.phpT