When people dance, they bring water

Never better used this metaphor, after visiting a town in Beni (Bolivia) during its Patron Saint Festivities, where water and the benefits it brings to the land are vital for the life of the people who live in this land that flows with milk and honey.

We arrived in Santísima Trinidad the week before the patron saint celebrations began. Santísima Trinidad is a small community, home to about 200 people, mostly indigenous Trinitarians.

This population was born 45 years ago, when in search of a place and possibilities, many families moved from neighboring towns located ¨más adentro¨, as they say, which means that they lived by the river, in not so fertile lands that had suffered floods and/or other inclemencies.

The Trinitario Indians have a long history and a marked influence of the Jesuit missionaries of more than 400 years ago that the ancestors and ancestresses of the current inhabitants were able to maintain.

For about a decade, these populations have faced three major threats: settlers, who come from other departments to take land and expand coca leaf cultivation. Forestry, which destroys the forest and the natural species of the forest, with the environmental consequences that this brings. And the drug traffickers, who, in addition to benefiting from coca leaf cultivation, drag their young people into this sinister world.

We could say that a fourth threat is the different governments that pass and pass, forgetting about these remote villages and their needs.

We arrived here for the beginning of its patron saint festivities. This celebration would last three days with the classic entrance, evening vigil, main Mass, games, pilgrimages and community lunch.

I have visited several departments of Bolivia and different communities in their patron saint festivals. I have also visited several countries in Latin America, and witnessed patron saint festivals. Something that has always impressed me is that, when the people say "fiesta", it is a special and vital time that synthesizes beliefs, traditions, joys, sufferings and life of the people.

In this case, the community of Santísima Trinidad seemed very different from anything I had seen before in Bolivia, although perhaps not so different after getting to know it during these days. A community run by catechists, where the pastor or the nuns accompany and collaborate in the times when they can be present in the community.

On the day of the entrance I was impressed, not only by the beauty of the dances, not only that the whole community was represented, but that each dance represented an activity related to the land and nature: the axe farmers, the beekeepers, the fishermen, etc.

It seemed like a dance giving thanks for all that Mother Earth offers us and celebrating its fruits. Many of the dances were accompanied by the offering of a food or sweet made with the fruit collected by the group represented in that dance.

When did we lose that connection with the earth that our people have? Why have we stopped seeing the earth as a mother and turned it into a commodity? At what point did we forget that everything is interrelated?

Everything is related, and all human beings are together as brothers and sisters in a marvelous pilgrimage, intertwined by the love that God has for each of his creatures and that also unites us, with tender affection, to brother sun, sister moon, brother river and mother earth. (LS 92)

The festivities of these peoples help us to reconnect with our origin that springs from the earth and are a strong manifestation of the resistance of our peoples to be culturally destroyed by the system and the powerful. They suffer many threats, but they do not give up.