I think people from Europe don't imagine, when they read One Hundred Years of Solitude , quite how poor this area is - what the houses look like, the shacks. The people are essentially negro, from the past, very mixed. They have no culture, they hardly can read. It's swampy, it's mosquitoey, and as we know from Garc a M rquez's stories, unbearably hot. I even have a theory that people don't talk in his fiction because it's too hot.
Birds drop out of the sky, dead, because of the heat and the sun.
And these are not exaggerations. This is real. What Garc a M rquez has done very cleverly is, through hyperbole, made this life dignified, by exaggeration. It must have been all of the people who were at the station'. Since the time of your uncle, the colonel, nothing has happened in Macondo.