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Mar\u00eda Ignacia is the daughter of Mar\u00eda Carmela Languitopa and Alberto Paoa-Bornier, a grandson of the French settler Dutroux-Bornier, who took over the lands of the Easter Islanders and proclaimed himself \u201cKing of Easter Island\u201d, prior to the Chilean annexation.\u00a0 Everyone knows her by her nickname Macaoa , because when she was young, she was very skinny.\u00a0 The older people remember her as a special person \u2013 pretty, blonde, clean and neat.\u00a0 She was one of the few who used high-heeled shoes on the Island.\u00a0 Mar\u00eda Ignacia had a daughter with Carlos Charl\u00edn-Ojeda, a Chilean who had been exiled to the Island under the government of Carlos Iba\u00f1ez del Campo in the 1930s.\u00a0 Her daughter, called Diana Paoa, became the mother of the previous mayor, Petero Edmunds-Paoa. Today, at 97 years of age, Mar\u00eda Ignacia continues to be a lovely, sweet woman, but she gets very energetic when it comes to defending her opinions<\/p>\n
\u201cMy mother was born in the countryside and the people used to live in caves.\u00a0 My father went to work as a foreman for the Williamson & Balfour Company and then could build a little stone house with a thatched roof, although it was very small and was only used for sleeping.\u00a0 When the ships started to come once a year, we began to get the first construction materials.\u00a0 I saw a lot of poverty, but when I went later to the \u201cconti\u201d, I also saw poverty there.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n \u201cI was raised by my aunt, Merina Lataro Neru Tu\u00b4u Matahi, <\/em>whom we called \u201cMerico\u201d<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 She is my father\u2019s first cousin and she loved me very much.\u00a0 She planted taro, sweet potato and manioc in the countryside and that was what we ate every day.\u00a0 She would boil them up and the meal was ready.\u00a0 It was only after the Williamson & Balfour Company came that we had beef, pork and other foods.\u00a0 When I was 16, I went to work at Mataveri in the house of the Company administrator, Mr. Colin Morrison, and when it was shearing time I would go to Vaitea to sew bales of wool.\u00a0 He was my boyfriend and was a real gentleman.\u00a0 When he had to return to the \u201cconti\u201d, he wanted to take me but I wasn\u2019t allowed to leave because we had leprosy on the Island.\u00a0 Once, when a friend of Morrison\u2019s came on a ship and asked him if I was an islander and had leprosy, he took off my dress and said to him: \u201cLook, she doesn\u2019t have leprosy\u201d.<\/em>\u00a0 Then I asked the friend if he was a \u201cgringo\u201d <\/em>(foreigner, European), because I was half \u201cgringa\u201d.\u00a0 My father is the son of a Frenchwoman (Marta Bornier) and my mother is the daughter of a Scotsman (Carlos Mack). Touching her lovely white hair, Mar\u00eda Ignacia recalls the Naval doctor, Alvaro Tejeda, with whom her mother, Carmela, had a daughter named Regina.\u00a0 She tells that : \u201cfor a problem that I had with my hair, it began to fall out in large chunks.\u00a0 The Taote (doctor) shaved me and made me stay in bed.\u00a0 Some thought that he was punishing me and shutting me up in the house.\u00a0 He was a good doctor, but as governor he used to punish very severely.\u201d\u00a0 <\/em>In 1938 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the annexation to Chile, Alvaro Tejeda prepared a big party in which all who participated had to make a presentation of something with an Easter Island motif.\u00a0 That\u2019s how we began to rediscover the Kai Kai string games and the Pata\u00b4uta\u00b4u poetry.\u00a0 When the subject of Island dancing comes up, Mar\u00eda Ignacia gets out of her chair and shows a dance with soft, harmonious movements and the traditional hip swaying.\u00a0 \u201cI learned this in Tahiti.\u00a0 Before, the people didn\u2019t dance like this.\u00a0 They danced the Taritarita accompanied with music from the accordion and the harmonica.\u00a0 It was a more jumpy dance.\u00a0 The dancing of today is Tahitian.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Her younger sister, In\u00e9s, related that : \u201cHer husband, Ram\u00f3n Hey, was first married to Cecilia Tuki, who got sick with the leprosy and was taken to the sanatorium.\u00a0 When she died, Ram\u00f3n married Maria Ignacia.\u00a0 He beat her a lot and she would run away, back to her mother\u2019s house.\u00a0 Then he would come and take her back with all of her things.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t have any children.\u201d <\/em>\u00a0\u00a0Today Mar\u00eda Ignacia claims that she lives alone without any problems and is happy because her niece, Ana Mar\u00eda Edmunds, takes her and her sisters , Marta, Rufina and In\u00e9s, out to the countryside on the weekends.<\/p>\n Mar\u00eda Ignacia Paoa Rangitopa Mar\u00eda Ignacia is the daughter of Mar\u00eda Carmela Languitopa and Alberto Paoa-Bornier, a grandson of the French settler Dutroux-Bornier, who took over the lands of the Easter Islanders and proclaimed himself \u201cKing of Easter Island\u201d, prior to the Chilean annexation.\u00a0 Everyone knows her by her nickname Macaoa , because when she […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":10771,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[138],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-testimonials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moevarua.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moevarua.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moevarua.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moevarua.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moevarua.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/moevarua.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10788\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moevarua.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moevarua.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moevarua.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moevarua.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/moevarua.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/09869b85-5744-4b10-88e8-44974a8d5795.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
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My mother, Carmela Langitopa, my Aunt In\u00e9s and my Grandmother all worked in the house of Exequiel Acu\u00f1a, the first Naval Sub-delegate on the Island.\u00a0 He was very good; he treated the Rapanui well, especially the children whom he taught to read.\u00a0 He was like a teacher for the whole Island; he taught the women to knit and sew.\u00a0 My mother sewed shirts, pants and jackets for the whole town without ever charging because in the past people helped each other when they needed something \u2013 not like now.\u00a0 Acu\u00f1a also served as a minister.\u00a0 He would punish those who ran round with married women or the women who left their husbands.\u00a0 Some hated him because he was very demanding in his work and harsh with the punishment\u201d.<\/p>\nFeatured Reports:<\/strong><\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"