It was carnaval season here in Zaruma recently, and the municipio asked me to help with promotion of the festivities, especially the election of the´"Reina de Carnaval 2007" That basically involved going on a day long photo shoot with the six candidates, all local girls, and putting together a portfolio of images to be used in newspapers and other publications to get the world out about the fun to come. Here are a few of the resulting images.


The tallest girl is named Gabriela Samaniego, and a woman I know in the Zaruman market who runs a little comedor (small inexpensive restaurant with comida típica) whistled at me the other day, asking me to come over and talk. She said that Gabriela was ner nieta (granddaughter) and that she wanted a photo of her from the photo shoot. How sweet. Well I told HER that we were planning on burning a CD for each of the girls with photos from the shoot and that when she got that they could go get any of the pictures printed. The other girls are named Carla, Anita, and umm, shoot I can´t remember.

This is the best picture I got from the actual big carnaval day, last Sunday. This girl has a title that is something like "Reina de la Camara de Negocios" (Queen of the Chamber of Commerce.) I don´t think she lives right in Zaruma, because I'd certainly notice her walking around, but probably in one of the neighboring parrishes.

The reason I didn´t get a ton of great pictures on that day was because my camera seemed to have internally self destructed. All of a sudden it started showing images like THIS one on the little screen. Colors were off, images were stretched and distorted, and pretty much all heck broke loose inside of the little silver box. So, I took what I could, put it away, and went on a hike with my Chuffmate. When we got back, it was time for beers, lasagna, live music, and good old fashioned water balloon-lobbing fun!