The month of the Pachamama
In the Gregorian calendar there is no exact date in
the month of August in which the people of Tawantin-suyo made offerings to
the mother earth. Their children continue to pay homage in Buenos Aires.
In the calendar of the peoples it is the "month of breaking earth" or Chacra Iapvi, the time of farming. But before beginning the chores permission is asked of the Pachamama and offerings are given so that work is propitious and food for subsistence doesn't go scarce.
But their children don't want to cling to a memory and try, in the urban centres, to share that special day of our people with their brothers.
It is generally in the first day of August that the majority chooses to make their offering in this new living space. In reciprocity with mother earth, she is fed so that she can give her food that is our source of life.
A hole is made in the earth and the community people sat in a circle to feed her in the mouth of the hole, and that same food she will transform into food from which our children will serve themselves in the future.
Before the arrival of the Spanish to this part of the continent, many indigenous peoples performed similar practices. This is because indigenous peoples have a different cosmology to the Christian and Occidental one. The indigenous people do not conceive man as the superior creation, for them it is another being, alive on the earth.
This conception of the world which places man as simply another living being awarded them with a sense of responsibility in their actions in the environment where all living beings inhabit.
They were conscious that any modification in nature would affect the environment and in consequence all life it houses.
This circular cosmology, were the interdependence of the different elements of the environment becomes fundamental developed an observant attitude towards the habitat of the indigenous peoples.
This attitude allowed our predecessors to adapt to a hostile geography, learning to take what was necessary from the ecosystem that surrounded them.
The globalised civil society in which we live is the product of an unbridled race towards material progress, without measuring the consequences that the alleged advances in this "progress" generate for humanity.
Some practices like that of the Pachamama are still kept, not only in rural areas but also in cities.
Many of our parents who were born in the rural sector of Bolivia haven't lost the custom of perfuming the far ends of the houses with the k´oa, as an inheritance of Andean cultures.
