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CAMBALACHE

A soil, a water, an air and a people in perfect balance

By Shamaine DanielsPublished 2 years ago 5 min read
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Small falls in Orinoco River

I was a very prissy girl in a very manly town. I loved air conditioning, indoor plumbing, electricity and didn’t enjoy the company of nature’s many critters. My town was a mining town: sulfur, bauxite, aluminum, and a bit further out, gold. Parties were replete with manly men gambling, playing dominoes, drinking; women were dressed in their best attire hoping to catch the eye of the lucky miners that week. This was a no-nonense, modern-day city but after-hours had a feeling best captured in Western movies.

The landscape was filled with thundering falls, whispering creeks, meditatively-still lakes, forests with a variety of trees, but all I could think of were the bugs and humidity whenever I went to experience “nature”. I hated nature so much that I cried every time I went to the family farm because it did not have air conditioning. Yes, I was a priss and unapologetically so.

One day my dad came home to let us know we had been invited to a birthday party in Cambalache. I started to protest, all I knew about the place was that it was even more rural than our farm which must mean there was definitely not going to be any air conditioning. I objected at the thought that I would have to get dressed to visit this place knowing it will be hot, he tried to tell me his friend had two kids my age I could play with, there was one room that had air conditioning so if I was really unhappy I could stay there, but he reassured me I would have a good time.

On our way to Cambalache our car got stuck in red mud, I continued to protest that it was time to turn back because we were going to be too dirty to attend, but kids from the area came out to push us out so my dress did not get dirty after all, and I felt too embarrassed to protest in front of these kids about how much I anticipated hating where they lived, so I kept quiet and went along with my dad’s plans.

We kept driving on, no paved roads, just stops to ask people if they could direct us to our friend. I arrived in Cambalache to absolute hospitality. Everything was like a paradise, the animals were well behaved, the owner of the land didn’t have to fence them in, humans were partying in a space where there were domesticated animals and wild animals living along each other. There were few fences in this area so most animals could roam freely from property to property with no dispute between neighbors, and there would always be wild animals that did not belong to anyone. There was a little lake, and the breeze was so peaceful, I forgot I needed air conditioning to be happy. I ended up enjoying myself, and our host’s son, who was a little older than me, decided to become my nature guide and teach me everything he knew about the farm and the land; for the first time I appreciated the work every piece of nature is tasked with and how efficiently they carry it out, and yes, even snakes deserve respect.

From then on, my dad had to do very little persuading to get me to visit Cambalache. I would happily go to experience the breeze, and the wild animals that would visit as they migrated back and forth. While the domesticated animals were predictable, you never knew which wild animal would be traveling through and Cambalache was the one place where I was open to wildlife in a way I wasn’t anywhere else.

One day we visited Cambalache and as we were sitting, having a lovely conversation, a macaw came and perched itself on a tree behind my dad. I was elated, I had seen pictures of macaws in books all the time, but had never seen one in real life. To my hosts, there was nothing remarkable about the bird, she belonged there on their property for as long as she needed space to rest in her sojourn. A macaw sitting on their tree was normal and entitled to the respect she deserved for being part of the ecosystem, we were not to bother the bird and as long as she was on his land, we could never do anything to make her feel like she didn’t belong there. I just stared at the bird while the adults carried on, until it flew away. I was disappointed when it left. Our host noticed my disappointment and let us know that she came there at the same time every day, so if we wanted to see her again, we were welcomed to come back the next day, but we never came back that season. That was the last season she traveled through his property. I would ask him each year if she came by and he would explain that she hadn’t; after a while he was not sure that we would be seeing macaws come through anymore.

I would eventually move almost 4,000 miles away and would never see Cambalache again. I later learned that Macaws were becoming increasingly extinct, my nature guide would accidentally drown, my city would dump its garbage and create a permanently-toxicly-burning landfill in Cambalache, economic progress would see a pushout of the Warao and the bauxite, sulfur and aluminum companies would pollute the waters that nurtured our farm, our city and Cambalache.

Macaw in a cage in a zoo

I am still a priss, but because of Cambalache I developed a huge appreciation for the fragility of nature. That was a soil, a water and an air perfectly balanced by the right people to create that moment in Cambalache where an unknowingly endangered macaw could find its rest.

Nature
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About the Creator

Shamaine Daniels

https://linktr.ee/shamainedaniels

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