My Little House

Last Saturday I accompanied my friend Valerio (from the Alpaca-herder community of Qullpani in the highlands of Bautista Saavedra) to the town of Laja, almost an hour´s drive away from El Alto in La Paz, where a curious event was taking place.

Saturday was the fiesta for the patron saint of Laja, the Virgin de la Concepcion. Apparently we had already missed the parade by the time we arrived, but in any case all of the action seemed to be taking place on a hill overlooking Laja, where probably around a thousand people had gone to sit and make little houses out of stones and grass. Each of the architects of the houses was putting the building blocks in place in the hope that this time next year they would have a life-size house.

On the basis that the houses being constructed represented the what would supposedly be reality in a year´s time, I like to think that when someone strode over my plot that a giant would be marauding over my land this time next year, rather in the manner of the BFG.

Each of those making their model houses supposedly has to return for the next two years in order to thank the virgin for helping them to construct their (life-size) house.

As you can appreciate from my construction below, I rather hope that if my some quirk of fate I do end up with a house this time next year (whether constructed by my own two hands or not), it looks nothing like the one I built last weekend.