Bolivia’s Alpaca Surprise Written by Alison Rustand
Photographed by Celia Maldonado
I took a bit of a gulp as I confronted the disarming characters
facing me. Two freshly severed alpaca heads sat atop a rock wall
surrounding the adobe and stone houses that were my friend’s
family home in the Bolivian countryside. Here for four generations
they’ve raised alpacas and llamas. My friend Celia and I
were sitting with her aunt and cousins after touching down from
our trip from the capital, La Paz; and a boy of about ten had
just brought the heads out of a little store room. Holding them
by the tufts of fur between their long ears, he casually made
the handover to Celia who set them in their place. A stranger
to rural life, I didn’t want to betray discomfort at this
strange sight, but my eagerness to go with the flow still didn’t
put my confusion to rest. It’s just like that; when you
think you’ve got a country pretty much figured out, they
throw alpaca heads at you.
The question, “What the heck is going on?” was on
the tip of my tongue, but Celia and her aunt were sort of in a
different world, chatting in a mixture of the indigenous language
Aymara and Spanish. As my Spanish was still developing and Aymara
was so foreign to me it could have been Kling-on, I couldn’t
catch their drift. When Celia got a camera out of her bag and
started snapping morbid headshots of the poor fellas, the only
theories I could muster of “why, what and huh?” belonged
to a realm of fiction still undiscovered. Mercifully, seeing the
puzzled look on my face, she explained things to me.
“For my linguistics thesis, I’m creating a verbal
and visual list of the lexicon in Aymara that’s used in
relation to alpacas. Right here are two examples of a tooth deformation
called chunqu.”
Her aunt continued to explain to me that due these two alpacas
were having difficulty eating due to abnormally long front teeth
on the lower jaw which were cutting into their top lips.”.
When she mentioned it, I thought; of course; but up to that point
I’d really spent no time with alpacas. The bottom front
teeth were about three inches long, about an inch longer than
what they needed, and definitely not an orthodontically fixable
matter. I was visiting in one of the harshest months of the year
as well, July, when it doesn’t rain at all and the food
resources invariably shrink. This problem paired with their chaotic
teeth formation caused drastic weight loss in both the animals
and the family decided to slaughter them before they started to
suffer. Luckily though, the teeth deformation had no effect whatsoever
on the meat’s flavour. Our picnic that day was the ribs
of one of the head’s owners, rubbed in salt and brazed over
a fire. When I first discovered to what species the meat belonged,
a little wave of shock hit me remembering the faces of the many
doe-eyed alpacas I’d seen that day. But that feeling was
soon forgotten as I realized how incredibly savory the meat was.
The remaining daylight was used up as Celia photographed all
the alpaca products they had in the house. Their piece of land
is one half of a little valley that lies about a three hour walk
from the nearest vehicle traversable road, and their home sits
up on the slope while the alpacas and llamas graze down below.
From their house all one can see in any direction are low mountains,
or cerros, which cut out the daylight early and give
one a feeling of profound isolation; something akin to being on
an islet in the middle of the South Pacific. The family worked
quickly to utilize the hour and half of decent sun that remained
and I saw dozens of articles of clothing being brought to be photographed,
made from the wool and the bone tools that were used to make the
fabric. They explained in short to me the long process of spinning
the wool, washing it, dying it, and making the fabric. It was
pure and simple self sufficiency that created and refined this
work, but I couldn’t help be awed by what would seem to
any food processor and bread machine adapted North American as
genius and impossible skill.
Celia and her family all now live and work in El Alto, a city
bordering on La Paz, and their lives are only lived sporadically
in the valley; but up until about thirty years ago the family
relied entirely on their alpacas and llamas for their livelihood.
Their shopping trips would have been long arduous journeys to
other villages to trade for potatoes and veggies, both of which
being impossible to grow in that region.
Things have modernized somewhat in the family’s valley.
They now benefit from a tap, though that’s something fairly
recent, as well as on- again off-again electricity. As luck would
have it though, the electrical wires had been knocked out the
week before our coming and we were treated to a rustic night of
candles, flashlights and firelight. Actually, I forgot to mention
starlight, which was amazingly bright with the darkness left unperturbed
by streetlights. It was a whole other take on life I was shown
that weekend, and I feel lucky to have been able to jump out of
my bubble and climb into theirs for just a little while.
Alison Rustand
is from Nanaimo in BC, Canada. These days, however, she finds
herself living in La Paz, Bolivia. She urges everyone out
there to pack up their bags and explore the nether reaches
of South America!
