Kick-starting Randy's Memoirs

March 24, 2025                   Independencia, Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico

 Happy END OF MARCH to you all!

I just want to inform you that I'll be continuing with my BLOGGING on blogger.com!! 

Since returning to North America from Peru in I've logged in a measely 15 blogs including pixs of our time in Peru. 

There are 4 reasons why I wish to continue with this. One is the dictum "hindsight is  20-20". My reflections on the past with a look to the present (future?) I believe are merited and may ring true for you (OJALA, as my Latin friends would say = Hopefully!). 

Two, I wish to extend this as an intercultural exchange, having living in California, Alberta Canada, Ancash Peru, and now Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

Thirdly, my wife just returned from the UK and also having visited 1 week with our younger son, Tim, in Drumheller. With her she brought her Mum's archive of our correspondence which recorded our many adventures, hopes and dreams. Putting this together with my diaries of those times will prove interesting and hoperfully entertaining for you (surely I don't wish to BORE you!)

Finally I wish to REFLECT on where we've been! It's been 23 years since returning from Peru and 20 since we left SIL/WBT. I owe to myself AND my individual sponsors who supported us during that time, to speak to some critical (controversial) areas of those 16 years.

So stay tuned!

Collaboration… My experience.

From 1986 to 2002 my wife, Linda, and I worked with SIL International under a Peruvian Education Ministry contract to analyze, transcribe, and translate Quechua texts and stories, as well as to assist the local school system in the overwhelming task of creating a bi-lingual education curriculum for their K-12 students. A further contract with the regional bishop of the Catholic Church ensued, as well as a translation and publication of the New Testament in Quechua for this specific mountain region (Conchucos Valley).  This was all accomplished in 16 years of living in this version of “Middle Earth” at 10,000 feet in the Andes.

I’d like to describe for you how “collaboration” in the above tasks – working alongside and in coordination with others—was not merely some strategy in an attempt to “manipulate” others into getting our work done: 

          Collaboration WAS the work itself!

While some would exalt the linguistic work of “translation,” the process of community transformation continues to be imminently more purposeful. Literacy and translation are a means to a much greater end.

These aforementioned tasks were the realized “objectives and goals”: The “what” of our lives during some of the most tumultuous times in Peru’s history.  But “how” these had been accomplished had to be learned as we went. It had to be earned as we met with the many people who were at first so suspicious of outsiders, specifically of this Canadian family.

The International Community. From the beginning, there were many who worked with us and got us to Peru and further assisted in our settling into the high alpine village of Cajay. Wycliffe/SIL administrators and trainers prepared us in many ways, the impacts of which we only now are realizing. Many who had had decades of experience in cross-cultural development service graciously passed on the “nuggets” of their wisdom in the forms of key strategies and past stories and examples. As we ourselves eventually joined the ranks of “the experienced” it was our turn to then share our stories with others. This in fact is a traditional method in collaborative leadership—shared mentorship and I’m proud to have been a part of it.

During the first phase of settling into this new country, it was both a joy and a frustration working with the enclaves of expatriates living in various regions of Peru. There were all kinds.  From anthropologists, development workers, missionaries of every religious ‘ilk’ fathomable (quite a diversity actually!), to medical, academic, even political professionals. The camaraderie among this group varied, depending on the academic training, socio-political frame, as well as religious and economic lifestyle choices one adhered to. Some sought out and “settled into” these ‘camps’ of foreigners (some would call them ghettos)… often resulting in a forging of fidelity and continual social commitments to reconnect. For us as expatriate linguists and field personnel those from SIL Peru ground personnel in Lima, Huaraz, and even in Pucallpa played a vital part in our lives ).

However most ‘die-hard’ development field workers with whom we associated (SIL, religious or otherwise) attempted to live on the edge of what we then called going native – a commitment to take on some if not all of the cultural traits of those around us.  It was in our training; it was in our blood. I still contend that this remains an admirable characteristic for service to others. The problem is, as the saying goes, “A leopard can’t lose its spots”… a gringo can’t become a Quechua regardless of talent or training. However I now believe this struggle was for us a well-disguised blessing; one which had forced us to change strategies in mid-stream in order to more focus on those around us, rather than investing the many years necessary to become fully native ourselves (fully fluent, acclimated, and accepted with a fuller Quechua mindset and culture). Although we lived in our village setting for 14 years, our intent was to train-trainers and allow the communities and their infrastructure to themselves decide on the direction, method and even outcome of the tasks and projects: I am so thankful we made this choice of “equitable” collaboration. We were able to not worry about who got the credit, rather to simply work with and hone others’ skills once given permission to do so.

By far the greatest challenge and learning in collaboration for us lay within two camps of people. These were the people we were to spend the majority of our professional lives with in the Peruvian Education community and the Peruvian Catholic community. Al Shannon and James Wroughton, Jr. were critical mentors and trainers for us in this regard. They each acted out their heartfelt passions and even political philosophies and ideologies in amazing ways, which convinced Linda and me to follow in like manner becoming more sensitive to the needs of these two communities in focused service to them. As a result, by 2002, 400 catechists and 130 public school teachers became fully equipped to train their communities in reading and writing in Quechua. The basic strategy was to come alongside these communities in order to listen, learn and “pitch in” where we could.

Education Community: There were key education officials who became kindred spirits and lifelong friends (Leonel Menacho Lopez, Eduardo Mendoza Diaz, and Gabriel Ichiparra—to name a few). With such men we dedicated years of coordination, visits to communities, meals, and trail-hikes as well as tears and laughter, sickness and health. I am a better man because of them. To their credit, these men suffered much to collaborate with “the likes of us.” After all, being from a different culture, they risked their social integrity in order to work with me and be exposed to public scrutiny in a very volatile time in their nation’s history (eg., Shining Path terrorism in the mountains).

Catholic Community: Father Máximo Luna Julca became the priest in charge of overseeing the New Testament translation in South Conchucos, as well as promoting the Quechua reading and writing classes in the communities. After years of working together our lives and hearts bonded together, “beating to the drum” of the hope that, becoming bilingual and biliterate in Quechua and Spanish, these communities would then prosper and find their destiny. Of course many priests and catechists collaborated as well, but none were as dedicated as he. As well, the Tyrolian-Italian bishop, Monseñor Dante Frasnelli Tartar, required constant debriefings and reports. At first it was to convince him of our sincerity, then of the validity and success of our efforts, and lastly to rejoice in how much the communities enjoyed reading and writing in their mother tongue, finally celebrating the publication and dedication of the New Testament in Quechua.

“Quechua family style” living: Finally I’d like to talk about the collaboration which most affected us personally as a family. It was the everyday life in the village of Cajay, Huari, Región Chavín, where we became more and more closely associated, then “knit-together” with the family Aguirre Jara (Alquilina, Erpidio, Reyna and Lucho and their children, Flori, Linda Marlene, and Jairo). Renting their family adobe/mud-brick home for a sack of rice per month (yes!), we slowly restored it, collaborating with Erpidio along the way (from mud to cement floors, to plaster walls, to a full outside toilet, to hot/cold running water, and finally to a fully electrified house!). Within the first two years of living in the community we were accepted to eat with them… in their kitchen (a great honour!) while the quinea pigs and chickens scurried about the floor picking up on the crumbs and bits of leftovers. Later on we were accepted as padrinos and an official part of the family, taking part in the annual agrarian cycles of planting and harvesting the potatoes, wheat, and corn.

This San Franciscan would therefore say, 

                                              “I left my heart in… the Andes of Peru.”

Central Peruvian Quechua Women and Multi-tasking

Life for the women of South Conchucos Valley, north-central Andes of Peru, is much like that of my North American great-grandfather when he first came from Norway. A woman’s hands are never idle: Either she has a baby, a load to carry, or her hands are busy on a spindle, busily twisting wool strands into yarn as soon as she steps outside her door.

She will often walk an hour or more each way to go to the weekly market to buy the essentials and sell whatever she has from her garden or home. Her manta that will carry back her purchases also makes for good shading during a well-deserved rest along the way.

Children are a blessing in the eyes the Quechua. The family will spend money they don’t have (i.e. loans), to provide for the many special occasions in the child’s life. Parents want their children, especially boys, to go to school, learn Spanish and be literate, so they can get good jobs and a good lifestyle. But they also want them to maintain their family ties, traditions and age-old ways of the Quechua life. Children are included in everything and go along wherever Mom is going.

The traditional Quechua house in this valley is packed-mud walls (tapyal) with a fire-baked tile roof. Houses are nearly always two stories with a long covered open room or balcony upstairs which shades the patio and provides space to dry grains and tubers. The second story is also for storage of corn, straw, squash, as well as for laundry lines. The bottom floor is used for bedrooms and storage. A separate, one room (8 x 10) kitchen often has well-blackened walls from the smoke of many a eucalyptus cooking fire. 

 Aside from household duties, women help in the tasks of planting and harvesting. Meals are prepared for all the labourers and taken to the field at noon or, if the house is close, the workers pack into the patio area and are fed. The grain is cut, threshed, cleaned and carefully stored as the family food source until next harvest. Only a few of the farmers with larger fields can afford to sell their produce to the nearby town or to commercial trucks who come up at harvest time to take grain down to the coastal city of Lima. One of the ladies from the extended family, together with her children take the sheep, goats, and pigs out to pasture every morning. Often it means walking a long way up to find suitable grass on the higher plateaus

 Life is never so busy that there isn’t time for a visit as they all share the work or enjoy the festivals twice a year. However it leaves little time for reading and writing! During the 1990s most girls had quit school after a few years to help with the household chores or to care for the younger children.

Politics – Tough to remain neutral in a polarized society

As linguists and professionals in SIL we were trained to be “objective” and sensitive listeners and learners in whatever culture we were placed in. And in Peru, Ethnologue counts some 107 languages spoken within almost as many cultures!

However when we arrived in the middle of social, political, and economic upheaval, there were some defense mechanisms which, either by discipline or default, kicked into gear. 

   “Fortress mentality” is one. I’ve seen Peruvians and ex-pats alike use this, in our residence from 1987 to 2002. They’d suggest, “Ok, so put broken shards of glass cemented to the tops of the outside walls of your home or office, then upgrade them to rebar-spikes or barbed-wire coils, or maybe electrical wire with cameras. Make sure there are at least two doors to access the house from the outside; maybe three.” Over the years we learned that the security tactics needed to reflect the real danger present outside, not the fear and speculation. Easy to say, hard to do.

A good example of this mentality is the difference, during the 90s, between the security measures used at the U.S. Embassy and those used at the Canadian Consulate. Both were in Lima, but Canada at the time was very “neutral” in its positions on foreign engagement of its government and military personnel. In fact wearing a Canadian Flag there brought smiles and friendly and open questions from many. The politics of non-interference was very useful to Canada’s Foreign Affairs policies at the time and we tried to follow in like manner.

A separate strategy is to engage in discussion with the authorities, respectfully, and in a way that makes sense… to them. SIL Colleague Ron Fuqua and I were travelling visiting the northern mountain towns of the province of Lima. On our way back we stopped at the Education Ministry office in the coastal town of Huacho, right when they were celebrating the anniversary of Huacho as a province. We were quickly ushered, along with the provincial education officials, onto the street to participate in the parade march, waving to the crowds as we passed by (talk about awkward!). Afterwards we were drinking cokes and coffee at a restaurant, when the education director asked us, “Are you people political?”

Ron knew these people so I was deferring to him. But since he hesitated in answering, I asked for permission to speak, “If you think that recording and transcribing Quechua folklore, training teachers and others to write and publish texts, then training them to use Quechua in the schools—is political, then, yes, I suppose, we’re political!”

The man stood up, shook my hand with a smile and declared, “Good answer!”

However when bombings occurred around us, when a misuse of firearms and grenades took place in our mountain valley by the National Guard, or when members of the Civil Guard were actually caught at night (more than once!) robbing buses on these high summit (puna) roads, while disguised as terrorists, we began to wonder if being “neutral” was always appropriate. 

There came times when I needed to take stand. Three events occurred which rocked my North American sensitivities and biases. The first was when the Iran Air Flight 655, an Iran Air civilian passenger flight from Tehran to Dubai, was shot down on 3 July, 1988 by the United States Navy guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes. The incident took place in Iranian airspace, over Iran's territorial waters in the Persian Gulf, and on the flight's usual flight path. We heard about this on our shortwave radio, in the village of Cajay. Later on I was in a potato field surrounded by Quechua men and teens questioning me as to why the U.S. government would do such a thing. I was in shock, admitted that I had no idea why, and then gathered up my patriotic shame to apologize on behalf of my birth-nation. Whether or not I understood or could ever justify such a hideous act, I publicly denounced it.  Quechua friends, years later, thanked me for my courage at that time. Apparently many eyes were watching how I responded at that moment.

The second international incident occurred on Christmas Day, 1989. Quechuas are homespun and agrarian, but they have a sensibility of what is theirs and yours, often sharing and borrowing with reciprocity. Therefore they could not imagine the U.S. invading a sovereign nation, regardless of the atrocities perpetrated by ex-CIA operative and Panamenian General Manuel Noriega. None of us, of course knew that Noriega had been overtly soliciting and receiving military aid from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Libya, nor that his cronies interfered directly in the peaceful Panamenian elections earlier that year, beating up one presidential candidate and pronouncing it all null and void. Nonetheless I needed to stand in the middle of my Quechua neighbours as a representative of the U.S.

A final incident occurred in the Peruvian Andes. On September 5, 1992, ten weeks after Quechua Pastor Rómulo Sauñe was given the Religious Liberty Award by the World Evangelical Fellowship, he was shot to death on a bus ride on the way to Chakiqpampa in the Ayacucho region of Southern Peru. He was the main translator of the Ayacucho Bible and was my personal friend. I was shattered! Rómulo couldn’t have been a more neutral, peaceable and compassionate person, always praying for both terrorist and military as that each had overrun mountain villages. Perhaps due to the notoriety gained by this award he simply became another name on Shining Path’s (Sendero Lumino’s) Black List.

Due to the increase in Sendero activity in the Conchucos Valley, we were spending time at the SIL Centre in Huaraz in the valley just to the west 160 kms away. One night, two weeks after Rómulo’s death, there came a knock on our Huaraz door. Tension was high in the Huaraz area, so against tradition, I decided to open the barred window of the door and asked who it was. At least three men stood outside, identified themselves as Senderistas and wanted to come inside. I refused their entrance to told them why. “You killed a good friend of mine outside of Ayacucho two weeks ago. A Quechua who was loved by his people. I refuse to speak with you!” They didn’t know what to do with such emotion. I was “in the right” even though I was a gringo and they knew it. They threatened retaliation then left.*  From that time on everyone in Cajay knew where I stood and that my heart was for the Quechua people, enough to risk my life. These cathartic experiences (Rómulo’s death and the threat by night) gave me a certain boldness to continue visiting village schools, even when the situation became even more tense in later years.

Rómulo Sauñe and Samuel Sacsara playing the quena flutes

With the studies and implementations in our field research of Participant Observation (James Spradley et al.), we slowly committed ourselves to engaging respectfully yet wholeheartedly as visitor-members of the Andean society within which we lived. We had suffered and empathized with our friends and even with our godchildren. Edmund Burke once said, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." We needed to stand with good men and women where we lived and raised our children and proclaim, "We are against the bad that we see and we agree with the good!" We raised our hands in protest together with the Cajay community. They had accepted us; now we could accept them.

___________________________

* In fact our SIL Huaraz team had by then cumulatively received at different times five letters of threat shoved under our residence doors, signed by "El Partido Comunista Peruana" alias Shining Path.

The Wonder of the Andean Agrarian Cycle (Conchucos-style)

Many American and Canadian urbanites can identify with my wonder at the Andean Agrarian Cycle. Being raised a suburb-kid, I remember visiting my relatives on their farm in central Kansas. The early mornings, long hours, and connectedness to the land and animals were very different from streets, shops, sidewalks, backyard fences, and even the well-trimmed prune and apricot orchards I grew up with.

But when your valley floor begins at 3,000 metres (10,000 feet) and spans upward from one Andean granite cliff to the next, the rules are completely different. How do they live?  What do they grow? How do they even survive?

The 1990s in the Peruvian Andes was a time of both climatic and political change. El Niño was a notorious weather pattern scarce heard of until then, quickly traumatizing the entire Pacific coastline of both North and South America. At that time it was very typical for it to rain for 2-3 weeks non-stop with the craziest balls of hail. The results were devastating to thousands of hamlets and towns dependent on narrow dirt roads and footpaths for access to trade to the outside world. Most of the over one million inhabitants in the Conchucos Valley (Chavin Region, North Central Peruvian Andes) had little or no electrical power generation (no hydro-generators and only a few Briggs-Stratton-style diesel generators, with a continual lack of petrol). Most were, as they said, dependent upon their luck and their family ties up-and-down the mountains as well as those on the coast. When you’re living (not visiting) these mountains, you quickly learn the importance of relationships and timing. Who you know and when do you go to them—both were essential.

Most farmers had their own plots of land. In the land of the chuqui (Conchucos) each farmer helped the other farmer during the never-ending cycle of:

Prepare the land - Plant - Water - Guard - Weed - Guard - Water - Guard - Weed - Guard - Harvest

All fields were surrounded with stone walls, mostly to keep out the pigs, goats, sheep, donkeys, oxen, cows, and horses from getting in. I quickly learned the first week of our stay in the home entrusted to us, that both chickens and dogs can climb a wall (even high ones). Preparation and reparation of the walls, fields, roads, and irrigation canals—are also non-stop and require assistance and coordination. The community minka is such an event where all including the children contribute in some way (food, drink, and elbow-grease).

As far as I can recall, the cycle in Conchucos Valley (although varying according to how high up your fields are in altitude), is as follows:

Month	Season	Harvesting Crops
March	End of rainy season	Potato, oka, olluco (tubers)
May	Beginning of dry season	Corn
June/July	Dry Season	Wheat, Rye, Oats, Flax, Alfalfa, Tawri (lupin bean), Quinua, kiwicha (Amaranth)

Finally my sons’ fondest memories while in the village of Cajay [aside, of course, from: hanging on the outside of our Toyota HiLux truck as we hustled around switchbacks and hikes up small waterfalls or running with our 2 Siberian Huskies around the high summit lake of Reparen], are the various harvest seasons:

•       Threshing and winnowing the wheat leading the 3-4 horses to trample on the stalks;
•        Jumping in the wheat straw piles and watching as our Quechua neighbours set fire to some of the piles to cook calabasu (squash);
•        Eating the sweetest corn cane and helping in the cutting of the stalks;
•        Riding our meandering white horse Rayo (“lightning” – ha!) while they triumphantly didn’t have to worry about the fiercer dogs in the community;
•       Watching and helping in the potato harvest and seeing the many varieties and colours (especially the purple ones!);
•       Wretching at the smell and curious taste of toqosh (fermented potato); and finally
•       Roasting coffee over a eucalyptus fire (hmmm!).

Oka

Quinua

Yunta/ Plow-yoke

A “Gringo” in Quechua-land

A “Gringo” in "ever-changing" Quechua-land

Long-standing, traditional beliefs are hard to break. These are largely what forms our ‘worldview’. For example:

·         I never knew how much of a Northern Californian I really was, until I left Northern California;

·         I never knew how much of a Northwesterner I really was, until I left the U.S. Northwest;

·         I never knew how much of a U.S. citizen I really was, until I left the U.S.; AND (wait for it)

·         I never knew how much of a North American (Northern Hemisphere) I really was, until I went to South America!

My fifteen years away from home and my many comfort zones were life-changing and transformative. So why should I have expected it to be any different for the Conchucos Valley Quechuas during this time of great change, not only to their personal lives, but also to their families, towns, and culture as well?

How much did it change in Cajay Village? By the end of 1999:

·         Water was first piped to house-to-house
·         Ashphalted roads began to arrive in the southern part of the valley (by 2000)
·         Sewer systems were installed and some even had indoor toilets!
·         Electricity connections from house-to-house
·         Cell-phone and microwave towers were installed resulting in access to the Internet

·         Finally, the Ministry of Education officially sanctioned a full Quechua/Spanish public education program!

All of this occurred within, what has been considered Peru’s modern decade of development. Politically Peru was able to purge itself from terrorism (Sendero Luminoso, as well as MRTA), and began its slow ascent back to positive GDP import/export development. What did this practically mean to Conchucos Valley? For one thing, many Quechua farmers had sacrificed much to provide educational opportunities for their sons AND daughters, both regionally, and even to sending them to some of Peru’s most prestigious universities (La Molina, U. San Marcos, U. Católica, etc.). However there were cultural and familial consequences: Many returning to their mountain villages had changed to a largely Spanish-dominant mestizo lifestyle and ideological perspective. Their grandparents simply did not recognize them. And some couldn’t even communicate with their grandparents!

As Western North Americans, we were generally considered to be “at the top of the socio-cultural food-chain.” However when these coastal returnees met us in their own home towns, they at first “assumed” we were bringing “the best of the West” to their culture (money, modernization, even English in the schools). Many, who were convinced of this, openly criticized our presence and practices, without question. Others, when they did ask and then realized this was NOT our intentions, criticized us for wasting time and resources, exalting their ‘minority culture’ at the expense of modern/industrialized opportunities. The latter had declared that they had already ‘thrown –off’ what they considered to be the oppression of their subservient social position as mountain Quechuas. Although we had all of the accreditation and documentation from government authorities, etc., we were caught in a vortex of socio-cultural change we really didn’t understand. Of course we spoke passionately on behalf of the richness of their own traditions and folklore and its subsequent educational value. But it wasn’t until the children themselves spoke. Those between 7 and 17 years of age--

• They read;
• they sang;
• they composed … all in beautiful Quechua.

In community after community these children themselves provided the bridge between cultures. And we made sure that the credit in no way fell on us, but rather on the classroom teachers and catechists whom we trained: A grassroots effort which simply took-off! We desired nothing more than to be catalysts, giving freedom for this ancient culture to express itself through the authorized learning-cycle of its future generations.

But only until a few of our Quechua friends began to open up to us, did we then realize just how difficult it was for this change to happen. The ‘catalyst’ was from “the outside” just as most agents of change have been for them for the last 500 years.

From the time the Conqueror Francisco Pizarro landed on the shores of Pachacamac, south of Lima, in 1533, where he and his galleon of soldiers were blinded by the Inca’s castle/fortress guilded of gold, the people of Perú have been forced to submit to the changes required of the next wave of domination and control. These too were “white-skins” [mishticuna] who, once having taken control, sought out a systematic submission or, if not, extermination.  Mishti or misti is the more neutral Quechua term for the Spanish word Gringo.* However the colloquial and broadly thought of term for a ‘gringo’ in the Andes is [pishtaco] from the Quechua verb [pishtacur] to slaughter or to butcher (much used for a pig or a steer). Legends abound of conquistadores slaughtering whole renegade Incan villages. The folklore in the mountains is that ‘white-skins’ are connected to the spirit-world and at night seek refuge in the caves, streams, and waterfalls where other spirits rest [“Why else would their skins be so white?!”]. Let me tell two true events from my experience to support the fact that such legends and beliefs are ‘alive and well’ in the folklore of these Quechua communities.

On Sundays from 1989 to 2002, it was our habit to drive into the provincial capital of Huari. Much of its then teeming population of about 6,000 would always go to market in the mornings before going to misa (Catholic Mass). Cajay Village was about a 40 minute drive (30 min. walk) to Huari [walking down the mountains, one is able to cut out a lot of the switchbacks required by our 4x4 Toyota Hilux!]. After a pleasant lunch in town, we’d head back, but not before negotiating with about a dozen neighbours (including their various bags from the market) for a ride back in the bed of the truck. I noticed some of the older women were using canes and were slower in getting back home, so I would often stop along the way to invite them on board—always met by their brisk refusal. I wondered why until I began to understand some of their murmuring in Quechua: “You’re not getting my fat for your auto-fuel, Gringo!” They honestly felt that my truck had some way of ‘melting away fat’ from Quechua chacwas (old women)! After about 5 years of discussion, prodding and relationship building, some relented; but only some! [By then of course even those who still refused would at least hand us their bags to take up and then pick them up at our village door.]

My second story involves a particular passion of mine: running. I had met and befriended a black Alliance pastor from Lima, Victor, who was assigned to a church in Huaraz, regional capital in the valley west of Conchucos. One day we agreed to run together. By now you understand that there weren’t too many gringos in these smaller mountain communities. And, although Peru has had it’s fair share of blacks on the coast, very few ventured to live permanently in the Andes. But I moved out ahead of Victor, since he was a coastal Peruvian and his lungs hadn’t adapted as well as mine at the time. On a dirt path outside of Huaraz, I approached a ruku (old Quechua man) walking with a cane and he was cucata chagcheycar [chewing oja de coca or coca leaves].  As I passed him he spoke aloud but seemed to be speaking to someone else saying, “Cösa, mishtega päsacuykan” [“Wow! A gringo’s passing by!”]. Now I didn’t hear what he had said when Victor passed him, but as were heading back together, there he was again, this time saying, “Wow, look! The gringo and his shadow caught up with each other!” When I translated this to Victor we had to stop from running because we were both laughing our heads off!

Let me end this with a joke about Gringos a mountain Quechua school teacher once told me.
What three things are: Cute and tender when they're young but ugly when old?

Answer:

• Eucalyptus tree
• Ashnu (the donkey), and (yes!)
• El Gringo!
  
  
  
  

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* Gringo, a term of uncertain origin although the Diccionario castellano con las voces de Ciencias y Artes y sus correspondientes en las 3 lenguas francesa, latina e italiana (Castilian Dictionary including the Words of the Sciences and the Arts, and their Correspondents in 3 Languages: the French, the Latin, and the Italian, 1787), by Terreros y Pando, claims its origin from the word griego (Greek).