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The Open Veins of Eduardo Galeano

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The Age of Barbaria

Introduction

TOLERANCE IS THE WINE OF NATIONS

My father was the fourth or fifth child of twelve born in Uruguay to a Lebanese immigrant couple, she being Christian and he probably too. He lived his entire childhood in misery, digging up food from the field to eat, setting his bare feet in the cow manure to relieve the frosty early morning cold, fighting with other poor people for the bones discarded by the Tacuarembó slaughterhouse.

He was a schoolboy when he was already working with his siblings mixing mortar to make bricks or planting vegetables that later he would sell in town. As one brother would come home from school, the other would meet him at the entrance of the town in order to get his shoes to wear.

Eventually, at some point in the 1950s, my father successfully made his way to the capital city to study carpentry and radiotelephony and upon returning to his town started Fabrica de Muebles (Furniture Factory), as he called it, in addition to starting various businesses and founding a Rotary Club and some banking cooperatives, with some success. During the day he worked in his pharmacy or looked for some lost cow in one of his fields, and at night, for 30 years, he taught classes at the technical school. His colleagues laughed at his ability to fall asleep sitting or even standing up.