News Blog

On Saturday May 17th, Burners Without Borders held a ceremony to mark the opening of the I.E.P Abraham Valdelomar school in San Andreas. After months of hard work of building this school from the ground up, it’s now complete with colorful murals, world maps, desks and chairs. Festivities included dance performances from the students, Pisco sours, speeches, praises and a slide show displaying all the stages of production.

As day turned to night us Burners moved the festivities to a nearby cantina where we could celebrate in true burner fashion, by fire! Earlier that week we collected wood at various demolition sites we had been working at during the day to be able to build art structures by night. The result was a fifteen foot tall robot accompanied by a twenty foot tall pyrotechnic pyramid.

The cantina had a plenty of space to set up our structures and they agreed to let us nutty gringos create a scene. The night started out with lighting up some poi and spinning to set the fire theme. Many lit up for the very first time that night, Pepe the president of Pisco Power also took a stab at it. Loud music blared and no one went easy on the drinks, pitchers of rum and cokes and Cristal beers were constantly flowing. A couple of us were manning the propane tanks that were rigged to the pyramid shooting five foot flames from the four corners. Possibly dangerous, highly recommended, safety third.

Ron Conner then brought out his guitar and rocked our asses with his ode to shitters. You can see it here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEFizrE1Yr0.

Not short of an encore he jumped into Ring of Fire with help from his five piece PVC orchestra. By this time the structures were well soaked with gasoline and ablaze in full glory. As the structures went up in flames a mix of volunteers and locals threw more gas and wood onto the crumbling inferno. Some people stayed near the fires while others took to the dance floor. The Pisco Power members were there dancing making us gringos look bad and teaching us a move or two.

A good number of volunteers have never been to Burning Man or taken part in any sort of burn. After such a fantastic night many are planning to do what ever they can to make it out to the big burn at Black Rock City this summer.
Being here in Pisco us burners are here to work hard for all the right reasons and at the same time still express the interests that make us who we are, builders, thinkers, artists and tradesman who make all the projects here possible to carry out. With this burn, friends from the community were finally able to see why we call ourselves burners.

-Nick Stonehocker and Kelli Brennan