mi familia

every night when i come home with the camera bag on my back, my backpack on my front, my camera over one shoulder and the tripod over the other, alicia (the mother in the family i am staying with) groans: ¨mucho trabajo, maya. too much, too much.¨ one night at dinner last week, alicia and her husband reynaldo insisted that i have a day without work. we agreed on saturday. reynaldo had to work that day. from what i understood, he was going with a bunch of men to work on an irigation system on someone´s farmland.

alicia and reynaldo had referred repeatedly to ¨la chakra.¨ reaynaldo often goes there to work. up until recently i had thought this was a name of town, but recently came to understand that ¨la chakra¨is a plot of farm land. the family has a plot about an hour´s walk from ollantaytambo, near huiloc, and on saturday, alicia, gaby, conrado, lorenzo and i piled into a taxi with bunch of bags for a day of libertad on la chakra.

(and guess i should explain a bit about my family before i go any furthur. alicia is 33 and her husband reynaldo is 66. he lived in america for about 12 years, most of them in new york. he learned english while he was there, but has forgotten most of it. our dinners are usually spent talking about ny, which he loves to tell animated stories about, and reminding him of english words for things. alicia and reynaldo have 2 children, gaby is 5 and conrado is 10. gaby and i communicate mostly by making funny faces at each other over the dinner table. they have a 14 year old boy named lorenzo living with them as well. he is from a town a day´s walk away and is living with the family so he can go to school in ollantaytambo.)

as soon as we got to la chakra, alicia put conrado and lorenzo to work gathering rocks to make a horno (oven). a cousin of reynaldo´s and 2 kids who lived nearby came over to help. they built an amazing small round domed oven out of the rocks, first letting a fire burn in it for about an hour and then collapsing it and placing all the food on the hot rocks to cook for another hour, covering it with paper sacks and dirt to keep the heat in.


while we were waiting for the food to cook, gaby went and picked some purple flowers and brought them over to me. she carefully peeled away the purple petals to reveal a tiny white flower in the center attached to a sharp little stemen. she pushed my hair away and put the flowers in my ears for earrings and i did the same for her. we then brushed away the dirt and peeled back the paper from the horno and ate a large lunch of chicken, yams and plantaines. it was a good day off.