My favorite pastime was flying a kite. We made our
kites with bamboo sticks as frames and newspapers or silk paper as the main body.
I had a friend and neighbor, Pastor Benedito, who taught me how to makes kites, fly them, and fight other kites in the air.
We had a stone grinder where we ground pieces of glass into powder, mixed it with glue, and rubbed it on our kites’ string. When the kites were in a dog-fight and the strings touched each other, we let loose our kite fast, thus cutting the string of the other kite with our “armed” string.
I used to go and fly my kite on top of the Casamata or in the fields now occupied by houses back of the present bus station near Casamata.
After the rice harvest and when the North wind was blowing, we would fly our kites in the rice fields at the western slope of the Casamata.
Our kites were of different shapes and sizes. We had a triangular kite with a long tail, an owl-like kite with a short tail, and a big kite in the shape of an airplane.
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