Peeing boy statue?

In my most recent blog I wrote about a ridiculous incident on the bus where a mother held her around 5 year old boy up to the window so he could pee out the window of the moving bus. The other volunteer and I were outraged and in disbelief. Locals did not think twice about the obscenity of the incident. You see peeing in public here in Ecuador is widely accepted, and is just as common as a breast hanging out in public as the mother breastfeeds.
Some cases for evidence: just the other day I saw a mother take the diaper off of her baby girl so that she could squat naked and pee, right outside a restaurant on a main corner (which probably had a bathroom inside). I´ve heard of a grown women pulling up her skirt and peeing on a side street, of a boy peeing in the middle of a crowd of people at the bus check point (and of course pee trickling around everyone’s belongings), and of course the everyday pee scenes as you walk down the road, at least the men usually turn towards a wall to pee, while little boys will pee facing out to the road as if hitting someone would gain them a point .
Needless to say, peeing in public is more than widely accepted and common. It is one thing I will never get use to seeing or understand, I use to think well if women have to hold it until they find a restroom men should as well, although now that I have seen a girl popping a squat in public not even that holds true.
Recently we were traveling for the day to a town in the northern part of the providence, Zaruma. Zaruma is a small town set in the gorgeous mountains. It was once a mining town, which left a strong European influence on the residents. I always saw Zaruma as a more sophisticated, clean city, I guess y could say holding them to higher standards. As we were wondering through their cute central park, we stumbled upon this…


There it was, right there in the middle of this cute central park in this conservative Catholic town a prominent statue of a peeing boy. We joined the other visitors gathered around posing for pictures with the statue. The statue defiantly ranks as the most ridiculous statue I have seen in Ecuador, followed by the giant statue on the border crossing of a man exchanging money.
Now, when I saw the statue I had to wonder if it were there because the people of Zaruma are proud of the habit of public displays of peeing, or if they were making fun of other cities where this is a common scene. So, after some research at the tourist office it turns out some French people brought the statute and left it there and that´s why it´s there. I was really kind of hoping for an outrageous story to go along side an outrageous statue, although regardless of the story for how it got there, the peeing boy statue defiantly tells its own story about this all too common habit of public displays of peeing here.