My goodbye party was everything I thought it would be and more. I thought it would be difficult dealing with people asking for gifts. It was. I thought people wouldn't acknowledge any of my contributions. They didn't. It was a day I was dreading for weeks in fear of it leaving a sour taste in my mouth. It did at least for the day.
My despedida was low-key. I made coffee, chicha, and hojaldre for everyone in the community.
Attendance was high, higher than it had been for any other meeting in my two years in Calante. For weeks the community was abuzz, relentlessly asking for my stuff. I explained that I was having a raffle and that they would have to wait until my despedida.
Oti was having a tombola for his stuff. Free stuff?! Forget the countless health presentations and maintaining the aqueduct for two years and teaching English and building a new intake for year-round access to clean water. Finally we get something out of this gringo!
The raffle featured about forty clusters of items: blankets, clothes, 5-gallon buckets, containers of sundry kitchen items. Community members drew numbers so that number 1 would choose one item first, number 2 would follow, and so on. The tombola got off to an inauspicious start when I called "one" and my old host mom handed me a torn piece of paper where the "1" was obviously part of another number. Oddly, no one else came forward. Coincidentally, no one came up to choose the 11th item.
After the despedida, most of the community left without saying thank you or goodbye. A 3-year-old girl came up to me holding the ticket with the number 1 in her hand. Many complained that they didn't get anything, that too many children had drawn tickets, that I didn't offer enough stuff, that their spouse had received something while they did not, that I didn't know how to run a raffle. Keep in mind these are full grown adults and everything had been free. It would have been depressing if everything hadn't been so comically over the top.
As I made my final hike down to Kwite I thought about the beauty of the river. I thought about how many great experiences I've had despite my community's shortcomings. On the bright side, it was not a tearful goodbye. The community had the courtesy to make it easy for me to leave. That being said, it would have been nice if my last day with everyone hadn't been another notch in the annals of missed chances, another opportunity lost for my community to have shown some signs of grace.
