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Riohacha Muchacha

Coming home in the car today, my wife was reminiscing and telling me about the years she spent in Riohacha as a girl. After hearing Elmo's stories, I am kind of interested in hearing more about the place. Unfortunately my wife's stories aren't as dirty nor as entertaining as Elmo's but here goes anyway.

Her father was posted there and the family lived in one of the houses reserved for military officers. A colonel lived next door to them and unlike them, he both feared and loathed the natives who lived nearby. As she recalls they lived in groups and had a lot of animals, sometimes horses and cows but usually goats and burros.

This was more than thirty years ago and back then, many, maybe most of them only spoke Wayuu and dressed in the traditional manner. The women wore dresses but the guys just wore loincloths that covered the bare essentials in the front. It used to piss her off that the women seemed to do all the work and she'd often see a woman carrying a lot of stuff while her mate walked along not carrying
anything. On the other hand, maybe the guy figured he had paid several goats or maybe a cow for this chick so the least she could do was carry their stuff. She remembered that there was a Colombian policeman who had paid some cold hard cash for a beautiful Wayuu but most of the time the price was paid in animals.

They used to sometimes go to Maicao which was the contraband capital of the universe. She said if it was available you could get it in Maicao and the place was filled with numerous traders and their shops of contraband goods. I guess since she was a young girl what she mostly remembers were the dolls that were available from all over the world for sale there. She and her sisters had a huge collection of dolls which one of her uncles later sold to get money for booze.

There was some kind of arrangement between Colombia and Venezuela that allowed the Wayuu to travel between the two countries without a passport or papers. One time her father had gone to Venezuela for an extended period and her mother needed to go see him to get him to sign papers of some sort. Her mother had no passport so she went with a group of Wayuu women that she knew dressed up as one of them. They chatted away in their native language but she had to keep her mouth shut because she couldn't speak the language well. It was enough to fool the guys at the border however and she was able to see her husband.

Her mother is a spunky woman even though she has a mal genio. Another time she was driving a car, again looking for her husband (what the hell was he doing?), and the car got a flat tire. While they were trying to fix the tire some guerillas came up and found them and asked them what they were doing there. She told them that she had gotten lost looking for her husband and they had a flat. The guerillas then fixed the flat for them and sent them on their way with directions.

I'd really like to check it out the next time we're in Colombia.

By utopiacowboy on May 26, 2006, 22:22 in Friendly Talkzone.

utopiacowboy says on May 26, 2006, 22:59:

I guess she knew the name of the place where he was but was not too clear on how to get there. Or bad directions. It's easy to get lost out there. We used to drive the back roads of Cordoba and after a while even my brothers-in-law would have to stop and ask for directions. Yeah, I know, totally emasculating to have to ask. Actually we'd stop and park and then wait until someone came along and asked what the heck we were doing there.

Disclaimer: any comment I make is inane and is not to be taken seriously, and is so patently ridiculous that no one should take it seriously, even as an insult.

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Miguel_Clavo says on May 27, 2006, 00:04:

Spice it up with a little sex, virgins, violence, and deceit,.. and you might have a best seller on your hands! just kidding, but it would be interesting to see how Colombia was back then....back when the guerillas would change your tire, and not force you out of your car in order to torch it......Did FARC have Bake Sales back then?

Just my opinion...

Miguel_Clavo...faltan 34 días...Colombia es pasión!

"Ignorance is a Weapon of Mass Destruction..."

"I would rather die living life, than to live a dying life."........ Oh, and my PM is always ON. Great Bumper Sticker: "Home of the Free, Because of the Brave"

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Cockney Colombian says on May 27, 2006, 17:33:

An interesting read Cowboy

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