“I don’t have many memories of when I was little, I only know that my mother died and that I had a younger brother,” Olivia said, before asking her how she left her native home to work as a maid in a family’s house. in Quito, when I was 10 years old. Memories of a girl!
Situation. Olivia’s mother died suddenly, leaving her helpless, her older brothers left to work in the ‘big city’. “My dad’s mother only fed us when she remembered, and the leftovers, what they no longer wanted to eat.” In the inclemency in which they lived, her younger brother died, “I never knew what happened to him, I tried to take care of him, but I couldn’t,” she said tearfully.
Case. As she grew up, she learned to work as a day laborer in the corn fields, while she defended herself. Many times her uncles tried to abuse her. “They told me to go to her house, or to let me take out the nits; once I got closer and he started touching me and touching himself”.
Namely. She thought everything would change when her older sister took her out of the compound where she lived. “She had to steal from me, because my grandmother wouldn’t let me go.” Her memory of her when she left her always accompanies her: “it was at dawn, and it rained a lot, my maternal grandmother gave us a few cents for the ticket.”
Job. When she arrived in Quito, her sister, who also had problems, decided to leave her as a domestic worker in a house belonging to a ‘rich family’ that she knew and knew would take care of her. Thus, Olivia grew up in a home that was not hers and taking responsibility for things that did not correspond to her age.
Difficulties. Among the things that she could not have is going to school or having her own toy, and this came to her when she was 15 years old: “for the first time I felt that she was a little”…
The entry Memories of a girl! It was first published in Diario La Prensa Riobamba.