Beauty Pageants and HIV Education. Why not?

Most people, when they hear Celine Dion belting about how the heart must go on, conjure up their favorite scene from Titanic. Mine used to be the moment that what’s-her-name told Leo “Ill never let go” and then pushes his frozen body off her raft. Now though an altogether different and perhaps better image comes to mind. That is one of two 15 year olds walking in their best outfits (picture: black turtleneck (wait, a turtleneck in Nicaragua?), white pants and an oversized dinner jacket. Add: lb of hair gel and cologne to match. And for the girl: red sequenced dress with slit and all. Add: red rose) across the “stage” at the pace of the song…so they were essentially crawling. But every step they took was about as dramatic as the song. Why were these poor kids subjected to something we would find humiliating in the States? The answer: they are awesome and I gave them the full 10 points. Mostly because of the dramatic red rose give away at the end.




As you might have guessed I was a special guest judge at the beauty pageant that Jill had at her site. And this wasn’t just some run-of-the-mill pageant that happens impromptu here in Nica. This was the grand finale of all pageants, the big one. I traveled to Jills site (Sabalos, beautiful) and was lucky to take part in one of the funniest moments I’ve had here in Nicaragua. It started with a day of sex ed, hosted by Jill and myself, and ended in a huge fiesta. What was in between though was certainly the most interesting of all. Sabalos showed up for a fiesta and what they got instead was a beauty pageant. This pageant was special because it was an HIV/AIDS pageant and included in the festivities were: a long, and very graphic charla on common STD’s- yes there were pictures, and children present; a casual wear competition- think tube tops and wife beaters; the formal wear competition I described above; a cultural number- some were super inappropriate and involved dancing reggaeton like maniacs. My favorite was this cute folklore number where there was a mermaid and a captain; and of course the question answer part, specifically about how much of the charla the participants had retained.



Being a judge was great and it was hilarious to compare my scores to that of the other judges. More than once when I gave a 9 to a certain couple my neighbor gave a 4. I judged the competition on how hard I laughed whereas the other judges probably took the pageant just as seriously as the participants and judged them as such.



One follow up note. My favorite couple, and the clear loser of the group, was a mismatched couple. The girl was much taller than the boy which made dancing reggaeton interesting and awkward. She was also clearly the boss of the group, and thus spent most of the time on stage yelling at her counterpart, who seemed to not care or hear what she was saying. At some point, I think during the casual wear portion, she was yelling at him (on stage) for wearing his baseball hat and he just turned and walked off the stage. They did not receive any 9’s from me that night.