Memories of a boy

Hello friends steemians, El Vergel. That was the name of that rural village where I lived the first two years of the sixties, when I was only seven years old. There I studied the first and second year of primary education, with my mother who was the teacher of the only school in the place. This hamlet was located between the towns of El Manteco and Upata, in the Bolívar State, very far from the road that connects both places. To get to the site had to travel by car several kilometers on the road gear, which left Upata, via El Manteco, then diverted, and take an old road of trains, open thanks to the trajinar of mules, horses, donkeys and carts pushed by oxen, that traveled this stormy path from the distant times in which the capuchin missionaries erected in these secluded places of Guayana, in the first half of the XVIII century, some mission towns. Through this trail the vehicle made its way through the grass, mountains and bushes that were along the route; it also crossed gorges, sands, barreales; It went up hills and hills sometimes stony, sometimes slippery.

The vegetal landscape was often covered with trees of chaparro, those plants with very warty leaves and padded stem, resistant to the powerful fires that in times of drought, when the sun was falling on these tropical lands, they wrapped with their tongues of fire the hothead savannah; other times we passed small forests that, similar to islands, grew in the course of the stream of some stream; but the most common was to find along the trail many mogotes of grasslands in the form of light green mushrooms that sprouted everywhere. And at the end, after three hours of traveling, we arrived at the ranch where I lived with my family, composed of my mother, who was the teacher, my father, and two brothers. In the modest house that served us as a dwelling, the only school in the place also worked. The little house was made of bahareque, caratas de carata and earthen floor.

It had a single room where we five slept, plus the room that served as a classroom. Here we were squeezed in the mornings about thirty boys, students of the first two grades of primary school. The students came on foot from many scattered houses, the nearest of which was about ten minutes away. They were children of farmers, owners of modest conucos, from whose work they extracted daily sustenance. Nobody wore school uniforms, men were covered in shorts of different colors, white shirts, and girls wore long skirts, also variopintas, covering beyond the knees. Most of the students, males and females, we used espadrille, a shoe of woven thread and rubber sole, that in many cases, due to the excessive use and because it did not recover in time, it was torn in front and made then one would go with the toes without any protection, teaching them constantly. In almost all cases it was the first school experience. But those students were very respectful. When arriving in the morning and saying goodbye at noon, each one of them greeted and asked for the blessing of the teacher.