Malpais? Not at all: Wonderful country!

Yesterday mi daughter had to attend a Malpais concert. There was a long earth wake in the afternoon and I was so afraid, that I decided to go with her and her friends. I am not a concert person. I love music, any music, but with a comfortable volume and in a nice place. Jumping among heads and yelling trying to communicate with the person right after me is not my idea of enjoying music.

Anyway, when I arrived to the gym, I realized that I knew the musical group. Fidel and Jaime Gamboa played in UCR pretil when I was there. Tapado Vargas is part of Editus. But the most amazing part was seeing Manuel Obregón playing the keybord wearing just an old, simple, blue t-shirt and a wrinkled pair of pants… I had attended his piano concerts and of course I like the Orquesta de la Papaya with those rare instruments made of turtles shells, pieces of wood, bamboo, sea shells, and so on; but this night was completely different.

Manuel Obregon is our Minister of Culture. He was wearing suit two hours before. And now he was in a school full of teenagers without Security Personal. His music colleagues made fun of him. Fidel Gamboa said: Now we are going to take advantage of “all the culture” that we have in this stage… and they played together a funny melody called “El Portoncito” and Minister Obregon did the funny chorus and made female voices…
Manuel Obregon is a wonderful professional musician. He is a classical pianist. He loves music and he plays a lot of instruments. Yesterday night he played marimba (La Coyolera and El Torito) and acordeón.
After the concert, some teenagers went to take photos with the musicians and they were not interested in the Minister. They looked for Jaime Gamboa and Tapado.
I felt really proud of my country. My daughter is a reporter from her school newspaper and she asked to Jaime Gamboa if Malpais is going to change because of the Ministry of Culture, and I almost cry when I was listened to the recorded interview and the musician said: “Para nada, nosotros somos unos ‘pisos de tierra’ y así vamos a seguir!”
This is our country: A place where a Minister can be in a public place without bodyguards. A place where a person is important because of his real hard work and skills, not because someone in the Government decides that he is good in some political position.

This is our Minister of Culture. This is our CULTURE.