Short Story: Yellow Bird Lady

Short Story: Yellow Bird Lady

Quinine pills. Water purifying tablets. Swiss Army knife (try and work out uses for at least half the shiny sharp things). 6 dozen green balloons. Folding camping stove. Tin mug.

My packing list for my six month journey to Peru in the early nineteen eighties didn’t quite match up to those of Shackleton and Livingstone. They probably hadn’t been helped by their mothers, and if they had been, their mothers probably didn’t insist on half remembered readings of conquistadores trading with Caribbean natives, or Frenchmen bartering wampum with Red Indians.

“Balloons, darling. They won’t have balloons there, and they’re so light. They’ll love them.”

My mother was new to the pleasures of working for the World Wildlife Fund, and often came home proudly bearing loot from various fund-raising events. Her conviction of the lack of balloons in darkest Peru was unshakeable.

Balloons. Quite.

~ ~ ~

I soon found my feet in the thin air of the dusty Andean slopes around Cuzco, where the sun would burn tender English skin whilst at the same time you were shaking with cold. I realized that it was quite normal to walk miles and miles across empty swathes of barren mountain and find a large school, often painted blue or pink. Some worthy government official in the capital city of Lima had decreed that education was the way forward for the Quechua Indians that sparsely inhabited the harsh slopes and valleys. Who knows how the decisions were made, but gradually school buildings had appeared in the most unexpected places. Each morning tiny figures bundled in bright wool would appear from nowhere, trudging through the landscape with a cooked potato warming their cold hands. They would eventually converge in the pinkness or blueness of their school, where a young teacher would have slept on the floor of a little anteroom, and would be wondering how to convey their tiny store of knowledge without benefit of books or maps or pencils.

One day I found myself in a blue school three days from Cuzco - ‘muy lejos’, very far, although it was probably only about twenty miles. Life just happened in Peru. You got on a camion, the battered trucks that were often the only form of transport, and you would end up somewhere. You just had to concentrate on making sure that you got enough food and drink to keep you going, and had a roof to sleep under, or a patch of ground to lie on at night where the Chagga beetles wouldn’t get you. I still can’t give blood, thirty years later, in case I got too close to a Chagga beetle.

In the blue school I was made enormously welcome. My sadly inadequate level of Quechua had a remarkable effect – the children could understand me. Not that I could understand them very well, as they chattered at breakneck speed, the Qs that littered their language clicking in the backs of their throats. They crowded round me, touching my yellow hair, which they had never seen before. They fingered my clothes, and stroked my skin, and one little girl, Gloria, kept pushing her grubby brown finger gently into my arm, fascinated by the white hollows that appeared.

It was quite impossible to make these children understand what an aeroplane was. Most of them would never travel even as far as Cuzco in their lives, and most would not live to see fifty as they toiled through one day after another. They could not understand where I was from or how I had come to them. I was an alien. I had flown through the air like a bird, with my yellow hair. I was a yellow bird lady.

The yellow bird lady had two things in her pack of wonders that the children marveled at. One was a bag of oranges, bought in the heaving market of Cuzco days before. These little Quechua ‘wawakuna’ had never seen an orange before, and it took nearly an hour to carefully peel three oranges (with my Swiss Army knife) and cut them into thirty precise sections, and for the children to swallow their oranges, eyes stretched wide in shock and pleasure. They learnt a new word ‘naranja’, and ran in mad circles, shouting and singing ‘naranja, naranja, naranja’, the juice in shining streaks on their dirty chins.

But there was more to come. Throughout the world, children have been infuriated that their mothers are so often right. My mother was no exception. As I pulled out the balloons, the ‘wawakuna’ crowded around me in stunned silence. When I blew the first one up they began to mutter, and as the balloons started to bob and shimmy around them there was magic in their eyes. Clearly, the fact that I could make these round bright birds fly added weight to the fact that I too, their yellow bird lady, had flown into their school.

By the end of the day, the teacher and I had somehow found scraps of paper and twists of twine, and we had written all the children’s names and where they came from on their balloons, and sent them off into the mountain air. Gloria cried when she lost sight of her balloon.

It was only years later, in sporadic correspondence with a Cuzqueno friend, that I learnt that Gloria’s balloon had made it to Cuzco. A lady had found it and had written a note to her, which had somehow found its way to the blue school in the mountains. And Gloria had somehow followed her balloon, and was going to be a teacher herself, a huge and remarkable undertaking for a little Quechua girl from nowhere.

I like to think that Gloria sometimes remembered the yellow bird lady as she stood in front of her own wawakuna.