For World Water Day

At the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the 22nd March was proposed as World Water Day to "raise awareness of the vital importance of water resources in sustainable development".

In Rural Libraries we have another way of looking at water. From the Andean and Amazonian cosmovision, water, earth and sky are a WHOLE that gives life to all beings, including us. For us, everything that exists is related. Everything lives. This is also what Alfredo Mires tells us in the book El derecho a la esencia: niños, derechos, comunidad y torcidos (The right to the essence: children, rights, community and the 'twisted').

The nature of rights

Some time ago we were talking about the spinning of wool and I asked how the torteros were made (1).

One of our friends said:

- In my area some of us use luntas (2). We put the lunta in the shuqsho (3) and with that the ladies spin. The lunta is the aerial fruit of the potato. We use lunta.

Another companion who was there said to him:

- But in your area some people must be ignorant, then.

- Why? -said the first one. We do use luntas.

- Yes, well, that's why they are ignorant. Or would you like your mother or your sister to be kept dancing, going round and round all day long? You wouldn't like it. That's the way the potato doesn't like it either. How can it be that the little potato is kept turning around, spinning, getting dizzy there?

For us nature is not a thing, potatoes are people too. Everything is a person. In the rural areas, food is alive, like everything else. When we leave the tuzas (5), the corn kernels, we should not leave them just thrown away; they should not run the risk of being run over by the animals because, if so, the maize resents it, the grains resent it. 

Even the elders say that when they weigh the food, the peas, the lentils, they resent it. And they go away. The seed becomes absent, it no longer grows. That is what the elders have taught us since ancient times (6). So, this is a relationship of respect with nature.

If we say that the human being has rights, then, where is the rights of the earth, and the rights of water, not the right of the human being to water, but the rights of water itself! Water has the right not to be polluted. It is not that the human only has the right to a healthy environment; the environment also has the right to a healthy human! The earth has the right to be healthy!

The way of perceiving respect and life in the countryside is different.

1 tortero: counterweight, usually made of stone, placed on the spindle to spin sheep's wool.

2 lunta: aerial fruit of the potato.

3 shuqsho: spindle. Stick for spinning wool and twisting the thread.

4 toíto: all of it.

5 tuza: corn crown. Zuro: corn kernel.

6 antiguas: the ancients, ancestors, also called "gentiles".