Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
MARIE ARANA
Dreaming of El Dorado
FROM
Virginia Quarterly Review
F
ORASLONG
asSennaOchochoquecanremember,shehasworkedtosupportherfamily.She
began at four, helping prepare food that her family would hawk about town, when her father
was too sick to pick rock in the gold mines. She would accompany him to market three hours
away, bumping down mountain roads in a dilapidated minibus in the freezing penumbra of
dawn. She'd haul bags up the slippery inclines, lug water down from the trickling glacier. To
earn a few extra cents, she'd drag rocks from the maws of mineshafts, apply her tiny frame to
the crushing of stones.
When she turned 10, she was hired to run one of seven public toilets that served the town's
20,000 inhabitants. There is no sewage system in La Rinconada; no water, no paved roads, no
sanitation whatsoever in that wilderness of ice, rock, and gold, perched more than 18,000 feet
up in the Peruvian Andes. Senna's job—from 6 in the morning to 10 at night—was to hand
out tiny squares of paper, take a few cents from each customer, and muck out the fecal pits
at the end of the day. When she was 12, she took a job that paid a bit more so that she could
buy medicine for her dying father. Trudging the steep, fetid roads where the whorehouses and
drinking establishments proliferate, she sold water trucked in from contaminated lakes.
Senna has pounded rock; she has ground it to gravel with her feet; she has teetered under
heavy bags of crushed stone. But she was never lucky as a child miner; she never found even
thefaintestglimmerofgold.Today,withherfatherdeadandhermotherborderingondespera-
tion, she makes fancy gelatins and sells them to men as they come and go from the mineshafts
that pock the unforgiving face of Mount Ananea. When she is asked why she slogs through
mud and snow for a few hours of school every day, as few children do, she says she wants to
be a poet. She is 14 years old.
Peru is booming these days. Its economy boasts one of the highest growth rates in the world.
In the past six years, its annual growth has hovered between 6.2 and 9.8 percent, rivaling the
colossal engines of China and India. Peru is the world's leading producer of silver; it is one of
Latin America's most exuberant founts of gold, copper, zinc, lead, and pewter. It is an up-and-
coming producer of natural gas. It harvests and sells more fish than any other country on the
planet, save China.
But it is the gold rush that has gripped Peru—the search for El Dorado, that age-old fever
that harks back to the time of the Inca. More than 500 years later, it is in full frenzy again, in
men's imaginations as well as on front pages of newspapers.
