The native Aymara lives in a straw-roofed dirt-floored hut in an isolated hamlet near Lake Titicaca at 4000m. He is illiterate, speaks no Spanish and has no teeth.
But he walks without a cane and does not wear glasses. And though he speaks the Aymara language with a firm voice, one must speak close to his ear to be heard.
“I see a bit, dimly. I had good vision before. But I saw you coming,” he tells a group of reporters who drove from the capital, La Paz, after a local TV report about him.
Hobbling down a dirt path, Flores greets them with a raised arm, smiles and sits down on a rock to chat. His gums bulge with coca leaf, a mild stimulant that staves off hunger. Like most Bolivian highlands peasants, he has been chewing it all his life.
Guinness World Records says the oldest living person verified by original proof of birth is Misao Okawa, a 115-year-old Japanese woman, and the oldest verified age on record was 122 years and 164 days, achieved by Jeanne Calment, of France. She died in 1997.
“I should be about 100 years old or more,” Flores says.
But his memory is failing.
His 27-year-old grandson, Edwin, says he fought in the 1933 Chaco War against Paraguay, but Flores said he remembers that only faintly.
The director of Bolivia’s civil registry, Eugenio Condori, showed the reporters a register that lists Carmelo Flores’ birth date as July 16 1890.
Condori said there is no birth certificate because they did not exist in Bolivia until 1940. Before that, births were registered with baptism certificates from the nearest Roman Catholic church, and authenticated by two witnesses.
To what does Flores owe his longevity?
“I walk a lot, that’s all. I go out with the animals,” says Flores, who long herded cattle and sheep.
The water Flores drinks streams down from the snow-capped peak of Illampu, one of Bolivia’s highest mountains.
He says he does not drink alcohol but did imbibe a little in his youth. He fondly recalls hunting and eating fox as a younger man.
Flores has not shaved for several months, has long fingernails and has been wearing the same unwashed clothes for some time.
His clothing includes tyre rubber-soled sandals, a woollen cap and a brimmed hat for extra protection from the hot Andean sun.
He says he has never been further afield than La Paz, 80km away, and has never been seriously ill.
And he sorely misses his wife, who died more than a decade ago.
Of their three children, only one is still alive: Cecilio, 67.
He has 40 grandchildren and 19 great-grandchildren but most have left the hamlet of Frasquia, a dozen homes located a two-hour walk from the nearest road in Warisata.
His grandson Edwin, and Edwin’s wife and their two children, live next door.
From www.timeslive.co.za
