For me Chincha is best represented by a little girl named Paloma. I believe she is about four years old. The first day that I met Paloma, she came crawling up to me on all fours meowing and then declared, ¨Soy una gatita!¨ with the biggest smile you´ve ever seen, as if I might need clarification that she was the cutest ¨little cat¨ there ever was.
Coming on this trip, I had some fears and reservations about what I would be able to provide to the chidren that we would meet. I didn´t have my trapeze with me, nor the places to rig anything if I did...I didn´t know anyone I´d be working with from Dreamtime to prepare ahead of time for being in a show or planning a workshop. And I feared that I wouldn´t have enough to offer, or that I wouldn´t fit in.
Paloma changed all of that for me in the first two seconds of meeting her. Immediately, she seemed to decide that I was worthy of her amazing friendship. Whenever I was in sight from the door of Mayten´s house, her little voice yelling, ¨Nina!¨ and calling me out to play rang through the house. She would make up games that we should play and insist that they be played, even horse rides (piggy backs) when my back was sore. She listened calmly from her perch on my back one evening as Mayten explained that she should be careful with me because I had injured my back, and after sharing her prescription for what native ointments I should rub on it to heal, solemly agreed to be very, very careful with me before kicking into my sides and yelling ¨Vamos!¨ with such glee, I didn´t really have the heart not to play along. I could always ice it later after all.
It´s hard to explain the appeal of Paloma without meeting her. If you look through the group´s photo complilation of the time in Chincha, you´ll see an abundance of her dimples and sparkling eyes laughing from her heart shaped face. A glow about her that defies the difficulties that she´s faced in her very few years of life.
When I don´t understand her Spanish, she is completely unfazed and calmly and slowly and quite precociously explains it all to me another way entirely. She may be the best Spanish teacher I´ve ever had.
I had a dream about Paloma before leaving Chincha that I had adopted her and her older sister Cyamara. I told it to Mayten and she said she felt the same way. But that not to worry. Paloma was a force to be reckoned with, a very strong little girl indeed and because of that, they´d both be just fine.
Now, sitting in an internet cafe in Cuzco, what I have to remember Paloma is a drawing that she made of me, with pink pigtails and a shining sun (my character in the show) and on the back her and I both in pigtails, holding hands and smiling and standing on a heart the size of the paper. When I think of Chincha, I will always think of Paloma´s laugh and the way she yelled my name with such joy.
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