A Revolution and a Revelation
I like adding in my little intro; my perspective or reflection, however, there are stories that are more powerful when they stand alone.
A Revolution and a Revelation
It was time to leave Oruro and go to La Paz. That meant selling the house and packing everything; the dogs, the parrots, the cats… all the memories and happy times. It meant leaving a big house for a small house and a small city to a big city. But that is the way it had to be. I had been given a penicillin shot for something I had and I developed an allergy from it. I had hives all over and it was so bad that I looked just like a monster because I had giant hives all over my face, I could barely walk and it lasted from Orruro to our beginning in La Paz, so it was not a good omen I would think.
But anyway… La Paz is a beautiful city and there is a lot to do but I was never fully comfortable there. I never made friends like I had before. The only wonderful thing was getting to know my uncles and their wonderful families. I started working right away to help pay for my brother's schooling, and I auditioned for a national choir and made it so that was another good thing. We went to rehearsals and were planning on putting on an opera I had a part in and I continued taking some english classes and typing classes. So my life was very busy but it didn’t feel like it did in Oruro. I had left being crowned a princess at festivals, then a queen and felt celebrated as sort of a daughter of the whole town, to just being one of the many people in this big huge city.
With that being said living in La Paz many wonderful things happened, many extraordinary things happened and many scary things happened. In 1953 there was a big big revolution that changed my way of thinking, the way I looked at our country and the way I looked at raising my future children. We had just moved into this house and all of a sudden we heard what sounded like fireworks. My mom came into my room, which had a lot of windows that looked out onto the street, and told me to get down on the floor. We crawled into her room because there were a lot of shootings and my dad was listening to the radio. The radio was saying that the revolution was won without a drop of blood and we had a new government that was for the people and on and on. We had a room that you could see out. The way that La Paz was on an incline we were up high so you could see down to some of the roads from our second level room and we saw tanks going by and soldiers. My dad thought if the revolution has been won then why do we have so many soldiers, so that is when it all started; machine guns and bombs and all of that.
The electricity went off and we had an electric stove so my mother would cook in the fireplace. We were all just sitting in the dark not knowing what was going on and we stayed like that for about 3 days. It was during holy week, it was Good Friday and with all of the shooting and the bombs we couldn't go to church, so my mom said “we are going to sit on the floor and pray.” We were all gathered around praying, except for my dad who was in bed reading, so we were all praying and my mom said “now listen”. There was a complete silence. It was the scariest thing you could imagine. Not a single sound, no noise, nothing. My dad and my mom got up and looked out the door and there were no more shootings, no soldiers. The neighbors started to come out of their houses. My brothers at the time were around 14 and 16, young boys who had very short haircuts because that is the way my dad liked it. My mom says “you better go check on your grandma”, who lived about a block away. She also told them that if they saw any open stores to get anything they could; bread, eggs… because we were running out of food. My dad and I decided to go to the room where we could see the whole city from and someone knocked at the door, my dad casually said “come on in its open”, and there were these guys, oh my goodness there were the most horrible looking guys, they had multiple guns. It was like you see in the movies Pancho Villa, with the hats and the big beards just sweaty, dirty… They told my dad they were looking for a couple of cadets that had fled from the military school and my dad said we had no cadets here. We went downstairs and my mom was explaining to one of those guys how her washing machine worked. She had a new washing machine and the guy thought that it could be a weapon or a bomb, or who knows. So there was my mom holding Patty and hiding Chi Chi behind her desperately explaining how this machine worked and what it was.
They ended up leaving and thank God that they did before my brothers came because they would have taken them thinking that they were the two cadets from the military school. They left and we looked around and they had taken the typewriter and all of the canned goods, they left but they didn’t take my brothers. So that was so scary for all of us. That revolution was a crisis for our country and its people for many many years. There was a shortage of food and there were shootings at night; it was a very scary time. That is when I decided that whenever I had children it is not going to be here, because I didn't want them to go through that, ever.
