Jan 16, 2020

I think the story they always tell about me is because I was born in my mother’s small town. She is the only one out of 10 children, and I was fed actually milk, day and night and something. They had a big farm with cows in it and we had a lot of milk, a lot of cheese, lot of butter and stuff like that. So I was fed like that. Then my mother had to come to the city because at that time when I was born, my mother had left my father, not for good, but to visit her parents. And I was born there. When we all came back to Lima, I got sick. Very, very sick, that I almost died. I was only probably less than a year old, and even doctors at that time told my parents that I was going to die and they should prepare for that.

So they had made me that little dress. One of the Virgin’s, Virgin Mary. So they kept that in case. But at that same time, my father also became ill. So both of us were sick. I had the whooping cough and my father had TB. And what happened, at that time, the only cure was to change environments. So they recommended for the family to move to the Andes section of Peru, which is a place that I really love. So I grew up there and I didn’t die because of the air that was clean and pure. And the food in the mountains..was so beautiful. Everything was great. That’s what my parents say, that I overcame this. And my father also got better.

And yeah, you plant things, you harvest things and eat, what else you want? It’s so fresh and so great and it was always sunny and the air was so clean, clear. The sky was blue all the time, it was just wonderful, a wonderful place to live in. And they baptized me with this name, “The Death Beater.” So I didn’t die. I survived with this.

When I grew up older, I was already 14, 15 years old. We moved back to Lima. In Lima my father got sick again and being very Catholic, my parents and everybody in the family and my father was named after this Virgin Carmen. So I dressed in that, I don’t know what you call that, but you said dress of the Virgin, for the whole entire year, so my father could get better. It was the same kind of dress, I made it myself, later on when I was 13, 14. Nobody showed me the first dress, only told stories. There was no cameras, nothing else. Well, my father got better-And I guess it’s the faith that moved mountains, they say-And I pray and I really always, wish that my father gets better, get better, get better and maybe some impact.

Anyway, that was my nickname, the Death Beater. So that story that they always tell about me, that I could conquer anything after that and I took that one, really, I took it seriously, since a child I was always very outgoing and doing this and doing that and making things happen and stuff like that.