You’ve reached the Sharoll Sinani Studio. I am Sharoll Fernandez Sinani. Keeper of the Heart Portal where poetry, pulses, ancestors, whisper and though dialogue alchemizes into luminous love. Take a breath step through. Let’s create.

Imagine a city at Twilight High in the Andes. Smoke drifts through the streets and a crowd gathers around a makeshift shrine of candles. A grandmother stands at the edge of the crowd chewing coca leaves slowly, deliberately in her wrinkle hand. She holds a small bundle of herbs. Her eyes glisten with tears as she whispers a prayer in a language that few around her.

Understand a language taught to her by their grandmother. This place is Senkata, and tonight it mourns. The air is heavy with two things, grief for lives lost. And determination to remember. But what does it mean to remember, especially when voices and even language have been banished or silenced? In this episode, we journey into a recent tragedy in Bolivia, the Senkata Massacre, and explore how memory and listening become acts of resilience.

We’ll hear poetry born from this pain, delve into the history that led to it, and discover a simple practice to carry these lessons into our own lives. Stay with me. By the end, you’ll feel the pulses of ancestors in your ears. And hopefully understand the power of remembering even the hardest truths.

Let’s ground ourselves in a piece of poetry. This is an excerpt from my poem To Senkata and to my Dead. I invite you to listen with your heart. I come with my little things to heal you. She sent me my grandmother with herbs, with coca leaves and with her commandment. You are going to chew with your saliva and with force.

You are going to rub her with her fingers outlining my neck like this, like this, like this. Saying She has taught me and here I am, she heals our dead. She feeds them and listens. She listens to them, and since she cannot come with the dead, she has stayed, but she has taught me to me. That excerpt holds so much.

I wrote those lines to capture a scene of ancestral caregiving, a grandmother sending her granddaughter in the spirit, me with cocoa leaves and knowledge to heal and listen to the dead. Its imagery deeply rooted in Andan tradition. Let’s unpack it and the history surrounding Senkata, so the full weight of this moment becomes clear.

First, you heard coca leaves mentioned for anyone unfamiliar coca leaves are not the same as the drug cocaine in the Andes. Chewing Coca Leaves is an ancient sacred practice. People chew coca to a stay off hunger and fatigue to cope with the thin air of the high mountains and as a form of communion with the earth.

It’s done daily by millions from farmers to city dwellers without harm. Much like Americans sipping coffee, but with a deeper cultural resonance for some coca is even considered a gift from Hamama Mother Earth In our poem, excerpt. The grandmother’s commandment to chew is part of a healing ritual. She’s saying, use our traditional knowledge, the way we practice medicine, our ways to tend to the pain.

Now, why would the dead need healing or listening? Here we step into history. The word Senkata now embodies one of Bolivia’s most painful memories. On November 19th, 2019, in the Senkata area of Alto Bolivian, security forces opened fire on protestors in a highly indigenous area. By the end of the day, 11 people laid dead and dozens more were wounded.

It was a massacre. To understand how we got there, we need to remember what happened in the weeks before. Rewind to October, 2019. Bolivia held a national election President Evo Morales, the country’s first indigenous president. Was running for an unprecedented fourth term. Tensions were sky high when the votes came in.

Allegations of fraud erupted. International observers from the OAS. The organization of American States reported irregularities, opposition protestors. Many from the urban middle class, took the streets accusing morales of stealing the election. The country was on edge. Within days, the crisis escalated.

Police units mutinied, refusing to quell the protests, then the military. A powerful force in Bolivia’s history. Quote unquote, suggested morales resign. Imagine the pressure the army, publicly urging, the sitting president to step down. And on November 10th, 2019, Evo Morales did resign unled into exile for his supporters, largely indigenous farmers, miners, and coco leaf growers.

This felt like a Coup d’état, a forcible removal of the leader they elected. Two days later, an opposition senator named Janine Añez took the stage in a nearly empty Congress. She swore herself in as interim president of Bolivia. Anez is a very different figure from Morales. She’s a conservative woman from the lowlands, and despite what her features may suggest, she has emphasized she’s not from an indigenous background, all this in a majority indigenous country.

She held up a large Bible and declared a new chapter for Bolivia to many indigenous Bolivians. Her ascend was alarming. Almost immediately, symbols of indigenous identity came under attack in La Paz and other cities. De Wiphala a multicolored indigenous flag that had been officially recognized as a national symbol was pulled down from government buildings.

Some police officers even cut the Wiphala patch off their uniforms in front of crowds. Think about what that means. A beloved symbol that represents millions of people ripped away and discarded. The message was clear. Your voice, your culture is not welcome here. So Morales supporters, were not only angry about this Ouster.

They were defending their dignity and their place in Bolivia’s narrative, and they were not only Morale’s supporters, they were the ones who identified with the indigenous flag, the Wiphala. It was way beyond him, probably not at all about him. Protests swept the country in the highland city of El Alto, a city known for its Aymara indigenous pride neighborhoods organized blockages.

One focal point was the YPFB gas plant in Senkata, a strategic fuel supply for the region. By blocking it, protestors hoped to pressure the interim government. Every day, men and women stood guard at the plant, including many campesinos, rural peasants, and Aymara locals, chanting, and waving the wipa. These protests were largely peaceful, though passionate.

They were saying, we exist, we matter. You can’t just erase us. The new government’s response was increasingly hard line President Anez and her ministers painted the protestors as violent agitators. Even terrorists on November 15th, 2019, just three days into Añez’ rule, her administration issued Supreme Decree 4 0 7 8.

This decree essentially gave the military and police a blank check to use force. It said security forces engaged in restoring order would be exempt from criminal prosecution. In other words, a soldier or officer who shot a protestor would not face legal consequences. Human rights groups immediately condemned this as a carte blanche for abuse, but the decrease stood, at least for those critical early days.

Tragically, what many feared would happen? Did happen on November 15, the same day after the decree in a town called Sacaba in Cochabamba, Bolivian, police and soldiers fired on a march of Coca leave growers that day left nine people dead on the roadside, most shot in the back as they fled. It was the first massacre of what Bolivians now call Black November Sacaba was a warning of what was to come back in El Alto.

The Senkata blockade continued to tense up. Residents were defiant. They wanted their voices heard, but also fear what might happen by November 19, the gas shortage in the capital La Paz, Was serious. Senkata was a lifeline and it was chugged off that morning. Under orders to break the blockade, Bolivian soldiers and police moved in with armored vehicles.

They escorted tanker tracks out of the plant, and that’s when clashes erupted. Protesters Desperate to stop them. tried to tear down a wall to get inside a facility. Witnesses recall the sound that came next gunfire, the crack of riffles, the screams as people dropped to the ground, security forces armed with live

Ammunition began firing into the crowds of unarmed civilians. Some who died weren’t even protestors. They were bystanders, neighbors in their yards or people watching from afar. 11 lives were taken in Senkata within hours. Fathers, sons an adolescent boy, women, Aymara people whose only crime had been demanding to be heard

Picture that scene, the grandmother we imagined at the start could be real. So many Abuelas in El Alto lost family that day. In the aftermath, the survivors and families gathered in shock and sorrow. They carried the weal flag and the coffins of the dead through the streets defiantly mourning in public.

The poem I shared earlier, I come with my little things to heal you. She heals our dead. She feeds them and listens is directly speaking to this moment. The grandmother figure is performing last rights in a way, tending to the spirits of those who died, making sure they are not alone and forgotten. In Andean beliefs, we honor the dead so they can transition peacefully and also so their memory stays alive among the living.

The banished intonation, why that title? It has a personal meaning for me and a broader one. I am a Aymara woman by heritage, but I grew up speaking Spanish. My grandparents banished their own mother thong from the household. For our sake. As a child, whenever I walked into a room where they were chatting in Aymara, they would abruptly switch to Spanish.

They did this out of love. They feared that if I spoke Aymara or even had an accent, society would treat me as inferior. In Bolivia, as in many places, indigenous languages and accents have been ridiculed and marginalized. My grandparents sacrificed a piece of their identity, silencing their natural intonation, hoping it would make life easier for me.

That’s one kind of banished intonation. A language of the heart that was exiled to protect the next generation. Another kind of banished voice is what we saw in Senkata. The attempt to silence a community’s cry for justice. When those protestors were killed, it was more than an attack on flesh and blood. It was an attack on their voice.

An attempt to scare them into silence. The interim government at the time tried to control the narrative, initially denying that forces had fired at all. calling the dead terrorists to justify the bloodshed, but the truth was too loud to banish families and human rights investigators gathered bullet casings, documented wounds.

Recorded testimonies. International observers, like the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, came and listened to the survivors, ultimately denouncing the events at Senkata and Sacaba as massacres. The voices of the dead through their relatives insisted on being heard. This is where remembering becomes powerful.

The title says The Power of Remembering, because remembering is an act of presence beyond resistance. In the poem, she listens to them, the grandmother listens to the dead. In reality, the community in El Alto listens to the dead by speaking their names, by demanding justice for them. Even today, people in Bolivia remember Senkata every year around November they march, they hold masses.

They tell the stories of who those victims were. A father who was on his way home with groceries, a teenager who loved playing the charango, a small andan guitar through memory. Those banished voices find their way back into the present. But memory is not just about pain, it’s also about carrying forward the love and lessons of those before us.

In the poem excerpt, notice how generational knowledge is passed down. The grandmother can’t calm herself to the side of tragedy. She has stayed with the dead, perhaps, meaning she herself has passed away or is bound to the world of spirits, but she taught me. The speaker says, in other words, the wisdom of our ancestors lives through us.

The coca leaves, the healing ritual, the listening. These are gifts from the past that help survive the present. Let’s also touch on the cultural practice described the idea of feeling and listening to the dead. This might sound eerie to some, but many cultures have similar traditions in the Andes during All Saints Day and Día de los Muertos Day of the Dead.

Families will lay out food for the departed and chew coca, inviting their souls to visit. It’s a way of saying, you are still one of us. After the Senkata massacre, you can be sure that families lit candles and offered coca and bread to those who died, treating them as ancestors. Now in a very real sense, remembering them through ceremony helps the living process grief and ensures that what happened will not simply fade away.

Now step back and consider the arc. A language banished in one generation and lives banished in another. In both cases. Love and memory become the remedy. My grandparents denied me their language out of love, and now I invoke that very language, even if I speak mostly in Spanish or English, as an act of love and truth.

Telling the people of Senkata lost their loved ones to violence. And now keep their memory alive as a guiding light for social justice. When we say the banished intonation, we are talking about finding the lost voice. It could be the literal voice of a grandmother’s mother tongue, or the metaphorical voice of a silenced community.

And the power of remembering is about using memory to bring that voice back louder and clearer so that what was suppressed can guide us forward. I want to highlight one more thing from the poem lines. She feeds them and listens. She listens to them. There is a profound reciprocity here. We often think of listening as something we do for the living, but this suggests we must also listen to those who came before to history, to the whispers of our ancestors and our martyrs.

What might we hear if we lean in, perhaps warnings? Don’t let this happen again. Perhaps encouragement we endured. And so can you perhaps calls to action complete the work We could not. In Senkata’s case, the dead might be saying, remember us seek justice and build a country where this doesn’t repeat. So how do we take this heavy heart-wrenching story and carry it with a strength rather than despair?

How do we apply the wisdom of leaning in and listening in our everyday lives far from the high altitude of El Alto? That brings us to our response tool for this episode. The response tool I want to offer is something I call lean and listen. It’s inspired by the very act of the grandmother in the poem and the attitude we need when confronting painful truths.

To lean and listen means to consciously lean in toward a story or person in front of you, and truly listen with full presence. It sounds simple, almost too basic. Listen, of course, we all know how to listen, right? But do we really, especially when the story is uncomfortable or challenging, let me paint a quick real world scenario.

Picture you at your kitchen table with your grandmother or maybe an elderly relative or mentor. You are busy. The evening news is droning on about some far away conflict, and you have a dozen things on your mind. Then out of the blue, your grandmother begins to tell a story from her past, a memory she’s never shared before.

Perhaps she mentions living through political upheaval. Or how her grandmother told her something in secret. Much like our poem story, you might be tempted to nod absent mindedly or even interrupt with a question, but instead you remember lean and listen. You physically lean forward a bit. You soften your gaze and you give her your full attention.

Maybe you reach over and turn off the TV or put your phone aside. You say, I’m listening. Abuela grandma, she notices your shift. She can tell You actually want to hear this. So she continues. Her voice trembles at first. These memories are ting with emotion. She tells you about a night, very much like the one I described in Senkata, maybe not with guns and soldiers, but perhaps with fear or with courage as she speaks.

You resist the urge to jump in with your own commentary or to hurry her along. You lean in silently, maybe giving a gentle nod. You’re not just hearing the words, you’re picking up the tone, the expressions, the intonation. Yes, that same word, intonation. The music of her voice that carries feelings. By doing this, you are honoring her story.

You’re making a safe space for a truth to be told. That is lean and listen at a one-on-one personal level. You can practice it anywhere in a difficult conversation with a friend. Or even when you encounter a perspective very different from yours, instead of instinctively pushing back or walking away when something is uncomfortable, try leaning in.

Literally if you are in person or mentally, if you are reading or hearing something, and focus on listening. Listen to learn. Not just to respond. Now, how does this integrate with what we’ve discussed about Senkata and remembering? Well, we just leaned in and listened to the voices of Senkata’s tragedy through the poem, through the history, and I can tell you that act is transformative.

It’s easy to scroll past news of yet another conflict, another protest, another cry for justice in some distant place. But when you lean in and truly listen, maybe by listening to someone from that place or reading a poem they wrote or hearing an interview of a survivor, you form a human connection. You allow yourself to be changed by what you learn.

For example, let’s say a news story flashes about an indigenous protest in some country you’ve never been to. The typical response might be, oh, that’s sad, and then forget about it. But what if you pause and lean in? Perhaps you find a short video of a witness speaking, or you hear a podcast that shares a firsthand perspective like you’re doing now.

By listening deeply, you cultivate empathy. The next time you hear someone make an offhand dismissive comment like, ah, why are those people always protesting? You might respond differently. You might remember the grandmother with her coca leaves or the voices of the families, and instead of arguing aggressively, you could share what you learned.

I used to know much. I used to not know much about it either, but I heard this story about why they are protesting and it moved me. Lean and listen. Can also diffuse conflict in our own life. Consider a workplace scenario. A colleague from a marginalized background points out something that upset them.

Maybe a joke in poor taste or feeling excluded in a meeting. It might make others defensive, but if you practice leaning and listening, you become an ally in that moment. You could respond. I hear you. I’d really like to understand more about what you’re feeling. Just that willingness to hear someone out.

Without defensiveness is powerful. It creates trust. It validates their experience. Often people raise their voices only when they feel unheard. By listening, you reduce the need for shouting. Let’s tie this back to the heart portal concept I mentioned in the intro. The heart portal is this idea of a space where tough dialogue turns into luminous love.

Lean, and listen is one key to that alchemy. It’s a tool you carry in your heart. It doesn’t require a special training. Just the courage to be present and the humility to admit you don’t know everything when confronted with a story of suffering. Be it your grandmothers, your friends, or news of strangers, you can lean in, listen deeply and say, I am here with you.

In that simple act memory, their story, their pain transforms into connection, and connection is what heals. It’s what turns memory into fuel for positive change instead of just lingering trauma. As we close this episode, let’s gather the threads together. Memory has weight, and we’ve been carrying some heavy memories today of a massacre in Senkata of ancestors who hid their language to protect their grandchildren.

These stories can break our hearts, but in the Breaking the heart opens like a portal, inviting us to step through with compassion. The banished intonation can be a grandmother’s tongue or a silence community’s cry. By remembering and listening, we invite those banished voices back into the circle of the living.

We say you matter. I carry you with me. The poem’s, imagery of healing with little humble things, hers, coca leaves, touch and attentive listening shows us that even when faced with great tragedy, small acts done with great love can help solve the wounds. We honor the dead by naming them and listening to what their lives and death stitches.

We honor the living by leaning and listening to each other, especially to those whose voices are too often pushed aside. Take a moment after this podcast to reflect whose voice in my life might be banished or ignored. It could be an elder in your family. A minority viewpoint in your community or even a part of yourself you’ve been avoiding, what would it mean to lean in and listen there?

There is a fearless presence that arises when we do this fearless, because like the grandmother in the poem, we come armed with love and tradition, not weapons or anger, and there is communal art in it too. Think of a visual with everybody singing an old protest song or a shared moment of silence. There are communities turning memory into something beautiful and strong everywhere at every given moment.

In remembering Senkata, we do more than revisit a dark moment. We also celebrate the courage of those who stood up and the resilience of those who keep the memory alive. We remind ourselves that languages might be banished, but they can be recovered. That justice might be delayed, but people will keep pushing for it.

The heart beats on the story continues, and we become the storytellers for the next generation.

Thank you for journeying Inside the Heart Portal. If these converging voices steered you, follow, review and pass the echo on. Until next time, keep shaping memory into fearless presence and communal art.