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Author Archives: Lulu

Altiplano Sketches : "The Altiplano (also known as Andean Plateau) (Spanish for high plain), in west-central South America, where the Andes are at their widest, is the most extensive area of high plateau on Earth outside of Tibet. Lake Titicaca is its best known geographical feature." --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altiplano

The Old One

About ten in the morning after my return to the Altiplano, a soft knock on the gate announced the arrival of old awicha (grandmother) Juana.  When she saw I was actually there , her cataract-veiled eyes filled with tears.
“I missed you,” she wept softly.
“Oh, Awich, I told you I’d be back” I chided gently as I helped her sit down on the stones in the warming sun.  Then I prepared her customary cup of hot chocolate.
“The others don’t make it sweet enough for me like you do,” she confided in Aymara.
She loves her sweets, this little old widow in tattered clothes who gropes her way along the paths of the fields with her study stick.  I asked her if she had been able to get to Sunday market recently.
“No, I just can’t make  it,” she sighs.
I don’t think our awicha is going to be with us long.  As we sit on the step chatting, she drifts off almost into sleep. “I just don’t have any strength anymore,” she murmurs.
When she tries to stand, I put my hand under her elbow to help her. Her bones are frail and tiny. She takes her stick in hand, and, bent under the weight of the cloth bundle on her back, steps unsteadily out the gate.
“I’ll see you next Sunday if not sooner, Awich,” I call after her in Aymara.
Each time I wonder: will I?

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Perspective is a matter of Context

1980’s

When the children from across the field were lookng at photos of my family taken from my last furlough home, Agripina was intrigued by some weird thing growing out of my sister Cecila’s head. I looked at the photo and saw what she was seeing. It was a fixture on the wall behind my sister. Once Agripina could see it as “behind” not “growing out of”, she immediately spotted it in other shots, too.

The same strange type of impression occurred with a photo of my brother-in-law who was sitting in the living room of my sister’s home. We had been gathered to celebrate my nephew’s graduation from high school. “Is that a coffin,” wondered Mario, taken aback by seeing a coffin at a happy fiesta.

I looked at the photo, and sure enough, right behind Ernie’s head was a rectangular edge, with a design of silver patina in the metallic grey color, the color that is customarily seen in coffins in the Altiplano. I could identify it in place easily: it was the shelf of the mantlepice in front of the fireplace. Knowing my sister’s house, so typical in San Francisco, it was very clear. Lacking that context, however, in the eyes of an Aymara campo child, the gilt grey box-like edge took on the shape of the end of a coffin.

A matter of cultural perspective.

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Altiplano Sketches

When I returned to Mocachi after a month away, the neighbor children came running over to greet me. After I unpacked my stuff, we visited in bubbles of excitement sitting in the earth-walled kitchen at the kerosene lamp lit table.

They recounted the distribution of sheep and llamas and cows from the re-structuring of the local government farming cooperative.

“We got eight merinos (sheep),” Mario boasted. “So we’re going to butcher our chuskas (mongrels) and then we’ll have all merinos! We got eight cows, too,” he bragged.

“No you didn’t!”

“Yes, we did!” And so rolled on traditional “my father is bigger than your father” competition of children.

According to Domitilla, her family already butchered one of the alpacas. But her sister Agripina said that was a lie!
The kitchen warmed with childhood storytelling and fantasies.
Early the next morning, Julia, one of the children’s grandmothers, came into my enclosure with a bowl of quinoa dough drops and fried bread dough. She thought I’d need some breakfast since I had just gotten back last night.

“Are you going to be home at noon?” she asked. “Well, I’ll bring over all you need for a nice barley soup and you can cook it up together for yourself and Marlene.”

“Oh, Julia, you’re a sweet heart!”

It was delicious!

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