The culture that inhabits these 7,100 islands has been many times diluted and then further ossified by each the conquistadores, the misioneros, American colonials, and also by commercial influences from the great East Asian empires. Dusty streets yield varied species of light. An estuary of candle flames, flickering their humanizing way into night recalls the occasion: a religious festival in a place steeled by its faith.

Scattered electric globes adorn a grappling tamarind and a Virgin. Laying the scene. Scatterling icons behave like fairy-life, the bodies of angels, a recollection of a prior world of light. These motivations underscore the scene, the roiling gloom, the sauna. They are internal truths, and this Festival uses light, purpose, and gathering to bring them to the surface.

It is the prosperous who host the Festival, who finance it, who march through the town, who hold the focus. They display themselves, their actuality, to the less fortunate, the unfortunate, the systemically excluded. They are saying: we know the life, the magic of the human element; we will take hold and one day bring you to fulfillment, comfort, paradise; we believe we can show you the way. This is what is imagined. This is why people are smiling.

The shock is not overwhelming. It comes gradually and in minor increments, in moments of pale recognition, centering on some small but terribly tragic scene: a compact universe waiting at the door to the games. It is the slow creep of poverty, and its consequences.

Here, a word like Independence does not roll. It gathers moss. It dwells dormant in a broken refrigerator, slowly colonized by parasites. Mysterious intonations arrive to agitate the word from all sides. Poverty tries to alter the word, diminish it, punish its sometime insolence. A word can withstand only so much impatient battery. It recedes. To people who know the word and revere it as a necessary and effective totum, it seems altogether unavailable here. Community emerges in its place. From hot secret springs. From faith. From necessity.

It strikes me, as a visitor, as symbolic that among these 7,100 islands, it is an irrefutable tradition of communal fate that describes the relentless vibration of what seems a culture, a code of being, a mandate for pursuing or deserving sustenance.

It takes a visit to the mountains, to a great volcanic lake, to acquire a feel for the variety and the spirit of this country. It takes a visit to somewhere as unimposing as it is awe-inspiring, naturally molded into its environment, because it has shaped the environment.