Never to get lost is not to live

“Never to get lost is not to live.”

Rebecca Solnit in her book,

A Field Guide to Getting Lost: on How We Find Ourselves

This next submission is not as short but is an intensely personal description of my “worldview journey” into the Conchucos Valley of the North-central Andes of Perú.

We were assigned to work under government contract as "literacy workers." This meant adapting to the culture and discovering ways of using the language of Quechua in the formal and informal education systems. As foreigners, this meant serving as appropriate "change agents" or catalysts for change in order to diminish the illiteracy rates among the Quechuas and to provide them with useful literature publications in Quechua. Of course this also included a translation of the Bible in this variety of Quechua.

Question: What is appropriate? What is, for example, a “proper fit” when it comes to sending leaders from other countries on contract with the Peruvian Education Ministry, in order to foment a radical change in the illiteracy rate among a proud yet struggling people? I have no idea and frankly doubt that it’s humanly possible to find such a ‘fit’. I’ve broached this subject with ‘program designers’ sitting in their plush offices from Toronto to California, Washington DC to Dallas, Texas. One comment was, “Well, isn’t your group professional? Didn’t they provide pre-field screening and training? Why were you so unprepared?” In deference to SIL International, I know of few organizations which provide as much pre-field (post-grad) training as they do. That’s simply not the point.

However after 30 years I can now declare with some confidence:

You can give a person the ‘mind of a leader’ through skill-sets and training. It takes deeply spiritual insight and passion to muster the heart and guts to lead others; that happens “on the road.”

I learned this from my experience with the Quechuas: What they would call ajustando carga en camino (adjusting the packs on the donkey as you go). Terry Smith (SIL translator) once told me, as I had just picked up a brand new Toyota 4x4 HiLux,

• “Do yourself a favor. Go out and get it good-and-dirty and scratched up. The truck is a lot like you: Best when shaken AND stirred.” 

Now THAT shook me! Only after several traumatic events took place that same year did I begin the path to realizing what he had meant.

Assaults, sickness, terror, and poor economic infrastructure. These were the four sink-holes on the landscape of our experience from 1988 to 2002.  So “getting lost” or overwhelmed, whether by driving or hiking through these high alpine hillsides, seemed to form both an external as well as an personal metaphysical constant. “Why?” was a continual question on our lips and in our thoughts. Unfortunately such unanswered questions can erode resolve, program planning and effectiveness.

As a career literacy/development worker, I was trained to carry (both physically and emotionally) the responsibility of such stress. The ‘rubber meets the road’, however, when raising and nurturing a family in this climate. “The frog in a pot of water on the fire” turned out to be the more accurate metaphor in our experience in Perú: Things were heating up but we couldn’t really decipher the signals.

Meanwhile we had an audience in the form of the Quechua communities surrounding us. On the one hand, comments like, “You must have failed as a professional in Canada. THAT’s why you’re here, right?” really should have been better understood as a guess to THEIR questions as to our purposes there. On the other, those who knew us, after a few years, honoured us with their form of intimacy of conversation and celebrations (usually centred in their homes over a deep-dish meal of some kind, uh alcohol included).

So when it came to emergencies (egs., assaults, terrorist incursions, sickness, natural disasters such as floods), these people formed the real information highway – and they were good at it.

On one such occasion our firstborn was about six months old. A few weeks after having returned from the coast Gregorio developed a high fever (44 C/ 104F). Try as we could with antibiotics and cool bathwater, we could not lower his fever [we found out later that he had both parasites and a bacterial infection despite our constant care of him—3,000 metres of altitude is a tough adjustment for any baby!].

A Quechua Evangelical neighbour and house pastor came to us under cover of darkness [we expressed a faith in God but also publicly embraced relationship with Catholics, professionals and non-believers as well].

“I think I know what’s happening to your son” he declared. “You see, I have beautiful children too, so some jealous people in our village have probably attacked you and your family by casting a spell on your son. I will pray for him, which is my Christian duty. But just in case, please follow my advice in cracking a raw egg into a bowl and mixing it with mashed rocoto peppers. Then sprinkle the mix around the perimeter of your house. This should dispel the encantation.” I didn’t follow his advice, but did pray. This was my friend’s solution to the envy and hatred of others in the community and he openly showed me his Quechua/Christian (syncretistic) mix of personally dealing with such a crisis. I thanked him for his advice.

The next day we once again left Cajay village… approximately the same time of day when a column of 200 Senderistas (“Shining Path” terrorists) moved into the valley, dynamiting bridges and calling communities together to ‘judge’ anyone they deemed deserving of torture and death. We escaped about 15 minutes before they came to the village! We like to say that God had used my son’s sickness to save our ‘white skins’!

“80% of field workers in international education and development never return to this work after their first four years.” That was the statistic in the 90s; I’m not sure what it is today. When we returned to North America in 1991 for 8 months’ respite I was burned-out and culturally removed from my Canadian-American roots and surroundings. Only war veterans, photo-journalists on foreign assignment, and other development workers were able to identify with this “numbness.” Actually this “reverse culture shock” had never changed, each time we returned for a 6-12 month ‘visit’ with family, friends, and supporters (1991, 1997, and 2000). In some ways I can say I’m still somewhat numb and removed today, even though we’ve now been back for 12 years. Perhaps these blogs are for me “a way back home” or, rather, a way to accept that my heart/soul is divided between the physical-climatic-cultural distance.

Some have attempted to sympathize, comprehend, and even to give counsel: Appreciation and respect for those who cared. There are particular who helped in various ways, none so much during our final days in Peru as: Al and Barb Shannon, who prayed and sat with us through ‘thick and thin’—Blessings on you both!