Ayacucho

There is a place in the rolling hills of Ayacucho where the green fertility of the land meets the sky. Each celestial cloud is incandescent with the golden rays of the sun and the serpentine rivers flow to an endless rhythm. The lush vegetation speckled with yellow and indigo petals. Water springs from the earth as if nature were trying to flood the fields with its nourishment encouraging the fecundity of life to produce more. This place is home to the indigenous population of Peru. Its people forgotten by many of Peru's leaders, but its history tainted and well known. History has been both kind and menacing to this place. Independence and terrorism color the lens through which it is remembered. The battlefields of Quinua often overshadowed by the more recent resistance movement, born a long time ago from the minds of intellectuals in Ayacucho. If you ask the people about their pride for "Quechua" they dont speak of it. But, you see it in their eyes. Their faces do not hide the stark reality of living a life of symbiosis with the land. Thus, there is a place that from its core and from the core of its people resonates such beauty that the only things an outsider can do is capture the memory, turn around, and walk away.