Sin historia; no futura

On our first night out of La Paz, we stayed in the guest house and bunkhouse on Teneria Ranch that has been in the family of Hans Hesse for generations. He and his family welcomed us with open arms and made a fantastic dinner of roast pork and local vegetables and fresh bread; all from their huge outdoors bakers’ oven.

We chatted for a while as a test of his patience and my Spanish; him wearing his Oakland As baseball hat for which there was no explanation. Hans was born on this farm 80-odd years ago and, until he was seven, only spoke Aymara learned from his grandmother. He moved to La Paz to go to college and then moved to Germany where he worked for a manufacturer of heavy lifting machinery in the docks at Kiel and Bremen. He traveled often to the US on business from Germany and knew San Diego. He must have done alright as he retired at 46 and, because “the pension was not paid until age 65” he moved back to family farm where it was cheaper to live.

He told me about his four kids, his Chinese motorbike that he still rides everywhere, the buildings on the farm that dated back 600 years and bemoaned the fact that the original buildings, whose foundations still poked through the grass, were perfectly aligned to catch the winter and summer sun on different walls but were torn down anyway.

He then described the family memorial in the centre of the property which pre-dates the arrival of the Spanish and was originally Aymara, converted to Quechua, then finally extended with Catholicisation to include a cross and a small niche for a statue of the Virgin. The tree behind the shrine was pushed over by a cow and they just propped it and the pine just grew that way. Don Hans told me that the bones of many of his ancestors on his mother’s side are interred here, as he expects to be in his time.

He is very proud of the clean air and good living in the mountains here and said that the air is so clear that in the 90s they used to regularly see UFOs. At the point I said that he had lost me but he said “It must have been true as they said so on the radio”.

I thanked him for taking the time to share his stories and family history. He thanked me graciously for taking an interest and he said “Sin history, no futura”.

Without a history, you don’t have a future.