Bakersfield.com

I worked as a farm overseer for four years in Popyan, Columbia in the state of Kalka, about 500 miles south of the Columbian capital, Bogota. I had twelve peasant workers who lived on the cabuya farm of 800 acres in the mountains. They lived in a large shanty wooden house. They did not even have a table to sit down and eat at when I arrived as overseer in 1972. They worked at a dollar a day for six days of the week, with Sunday off with pay. The first thing I did was to build them a wooden picnic bench so they would have a place to sit down. There are three or four harvest cuts of the cabuya each year, so the peasants had no vacation.

They slept on straw on the floor, they did not have a bed. They cooked their meals on an open fire in their dirt-floored kitchen. Their diet was basically rice and beans. This was their diet because they could not afford anything else. So when I arrived and saw their deplorable conditions, from that day on, my foreman Carlos and I would drive down the mountain once a month to Popyan in our truck, where I would buy fruits, vegetables, and eggs to give to my workers.

Every Sunday morning I would sit on the front porch of the hacienda. It was seventeen miles to the farm, and I rode it often. The peasants would come down the hill down the road lined with cabuya plants.There was a lake in my front yard. A river bordered half of the ranch. The hacienda was over two hundred years old and made of white stucco, with a porch running across two sides. It had two large swinging doors and two windows. Every room opened to an outside hallway. In the kitchen in the back, the maid cooked on a primitive electric stove. There was no running water. The counter-tops were wood or stucco. The outside opening had no door.. Fifty yards up the hill, behind the house, grew five or six banana trees that produced year round. To the left of the bananas was a pineapple patch. There were other fruits growing on various trees, such as papaya.

We had one house servant who cooked and doubled as our personal maid. I had a personal valet and foreman of both locations. He lived in a small room in the back of the hacienda. The name of our hacienda was Hacienda Palace. It was a historical landmark in Columbia. People come from all over the country to visit this site, but it was privately owned. The Columbians fought the Spanish for many years for their independence. The famous General who led the Columbians was Simon Bolivar. The Columbians lost every battle to the Spanish until they met Bolivar in the battle of Palace, where the Hacienda Palace sits. Bolivar stood his ground in this valley. He stopped the Spanish in their tracks, handing them their first defeat in Columbia. It was a haunting feeling to live in this valley where so many had died. I felt humbled to live among the thousands of dead heroes of the great general Bolivar.

In 1974 my contract was up and I returned to America. Someday when I can afford it I hope to return to Hacienda Palace.