EASTERN COLOMBIA — CRIST AND GUHL 397 



Villavicencio is no place for persons of nervous temperament, nor are the people 

 whom one begins to meet a day before the town is reached [over the trail from 

 Bogota] pleasant to look at, with their lemon-tinted, gaunt, emaciated faces and 

 hands of horribly lethal thinness. ( P. 140. ) 



Traveling in this sector is even today not without its hazards. Even 

 the main road to the southwest, between Villavicencio and San Martin, 

 is graveled only part way. The forest has been cut away and corn, 

 yuca, plantains, and rice are grown for the Bogota market. The 

 bridge for heavy traffic across the Humadea River has been under con- 

 struction for years. Motor cars or empty trucks can cross the narrow, 

 shaky suspension bridge, but loaded trucks must be unloaded and their 

 cargoes carried across. Each handling, of course, increases the price 

 the consumer must pay for his foodstuff (pi. 2, fig. 1) . While waiting 

 for the station wagon to cross the bridge we visited with a family, 

 originally from Tolima, who had settled in good faith on what they 

 understood was state-owned land (terrenos baldios), on which they 

 had built a clapboard-roofed house and cleared plots for their cash 

 crops (pi. 1, fig. 2). 



They are now engaged in a dispute with a person from San Martin 

 who claims that the land legally belongs to him, and who has a paper 

 (escritura) to substantiate his claims. Of course, he had never done 

 anything himself that would give the land value ; he merely shows up 

 to take advantage of the fruits of the labors of others. The woman of 

 the house is the mother of 10 children, three of whom are grown and 

 work their own plots of land in this sector. All her children are liv- 

 ing. The public health factor is extremely important. Whereas a 

 generation or so ago half or more of the children would die in infancy, 

 now a much higher percentage lives to maturity. And the child bear- 

 ing days of this particular woman are probably not over — as the local 

 idiom has it, she still has "la casa ardiendo" — roughly equivalent to 

 "still going strong." 



Many of the mountaineers who came into this area to work as 

 laborers when the highway was under construction cleared land and 

 settled on it after the work was completed. Many of them are now 

 planting coffee and cacao, which will make them a tidy income later. 

 They grow rice, corn, and yuca as subsistence crops ; any surplus finds 

 a ready market. 



San Martin was founded by the Jesuits as a mission in the seven- 

 teenth century, yet 40 years ago it consisted only of "rambling houses 

 and a half-completed church built around an enormous plaza." 9 But 

 there is good reason why the village did not prosper. In 1912 Hamil- 

 ton Rice, a medical doctor, found the tertian form of the malarial 

 parasite, sometimes in conjunction with the subtertian, in all the 250 



9 Rice, loc. cit, p. 142. 



