After a year of working in the lowlands with indigenous communities teaching health, nutrition, and home gardening, the Ecuadorian Ministry of Agriculture ran out of funding for further projects such as mine.

I had heard the Peace Corps officials mention the serious need for bilingual materials for teaching Spanish to Quechua-speaking indigenous children who lived in isolated villages high in the Andes Mountains. I enthusiastically volunteered to take on this project. It seemed like a perfect fit, given my prior experience implementing bilingual and bicultural education in the Navajo boarding school where I taught for two years.

The Peace Corps arranged for me to take two weeks of Quechua language training in Quito. In the classroom, the instructor began by letting us students know that several words used in English originated from the Quechua language, words like condor, llama, vicuña, guanaco, guano, coca, puma, quinine, and jerky. Of course, the spelling of these words in Quechua looks and sounds a little different from the Anglicized version.

After the two weeks of classroom learning, I lived for a week with a Quechua-speaking family. The Peace Corps paid the family to provide food and lodging for me. I made every effort to avoid speaking Spanish during that week so that I could familiarize myself with the sounds of the language in every day use. Over the three weeks of intensive language training, I learned to use approximately 100 words or more in Quechua, enough at least to make rudimentary conversation.

At the end of my immersion in language training, the Peace Corps gave me permission to choose the site where I would implement a pilot program in bilingual education. I wanted to find a site where the need was the greatest. The goal was to help the Quechua-speaking children learn Spanish to enable them to eventually get jobs in the city in order to help support their destitute families.

I left Quito and hiked up to a region high in the Andes where the people spoke very little Spanish. I walked from one hamlet to another looking for the best location where my helping the children learn Spanish might make a difference in their lives.

Most of the people fled when they saw the strange foreigner wandering around, but a few brave people spoke to me warily.

By the end of the day, I had chosen La Compañía de Jesus Cristo as the hamlet where I wanted to implement the bilingual program. I chose this particular community because I heard that there was an indigenous Spanish-speaking schoolteacher who came once a week to La Compañia to teach the children Spanish in the old one room schoolhouse. Although I hadn’t met her yet, I imagined that she could help me develop bilingual and bicultural teaching materials that could be used throughout these remote areas high in the Andes.

The community, located on the lower slopes of the mountains at around 12,000 ft., was populated by impoverished families of the huasipungueros, the Quechua name for indentured servants of the absentee landowners. The region was beautiful, filled with seas of golden barley that made sensuous undulating waves as the wind blew. Patches of quinoa plants of various colors added vibrancy to the cultivated slopes.

While checking out La Compañia, I thought it would be a good idea to introduce myself to the local priest. I found him sitting in the courtyard of his modest rectory that stood next to an ancient-looking adobe church. He waved me to join him for a cup of tea. We spoke in Spanish. This old Quechua-speaking priest, dressed in his solid black cassock, had come from Spain in the 1930s to convert the Indians to Catholicism and now he intended to retire and return home to Spain in a few days.

The priest spoke with a crisp politeness that barely concealed his overt suspicion of me. After a few minutes of small talk, he got to the point and grilled me about my motives for wanting to live with the Indians. He eventually understood that I was not a Communist and that I had no intention of starting a revolution.

When the priest saw how earnest I was in wanting to live in la Compañia and help the children learn Spanish, he gave me the contact information for the owner of the old and partially collapsed hacienda at the edge of the hamlet where I might be able to live. The hacendado lived in Quito and only came to La Compañia once a month to pay his serfs their pitifully low wages, the equivalent of 19 cents a day.

After much searching in Quito, I finally found the owner of the abandoned hacienda. He lived in a luxurious compound in the foothills on the edge of town. He reluctantly agreed to let me live rent-free in his decrepit building—on the condition that I swore I would never try to “change the Indians’ way of living or talk to them about religion.” He made it all too clear that there would be trouble if I didn’t fulfill my promise.

When the wife of the hacendado asked me if I was Catholic, I made the mistake of admitting that I was not. Clasping her hands together in a dramatic gesture, she said, “Dios mio, don’t ever tell anybody. The Indians will surely kill you. They are very religious.”

I managed to get out of that tight spot by saying that I was Orthodox Protestant, a religion basically the same as the Catholic religion, only an American version. Fortunately she believed my fabrication. After that encounter, I quickly trained myself to make the sign of the cross and, when appropriate, to give the benediction—in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. I hoped I wouldn’t end up in Hell as punishment for my survival tactics.

At the end of our conversation, the hacendado assured me that an American gringa like me would not last long living in the primitive conditions found in the indigenous communities in the mountains.

Two days later, after making all the necessary arrangements in Quito, I hiked back up the mountain with all my possessions on my back, including food supplies. Back in La Compañia, the people fled when I appeared. Even the dogs disappeared with their tails between their legs, as though I were some kind of demon.

From Pilar, the itinerant schoolteacher, I learned that the leader of the community told the people to forbid their children to speak to me. He told them that surely I couldn’t have come just to learn Quechua, and that I must have some other motive, like to either convert them or to steal from them.

A few days after I moved into the dilapidated hacienda, that same leader of the community organized a meeting. All the heads of families voted to kick me out, saying that I was surely “an agent of the devil.” Pilar spoke passionately on my behalf. She had much influence and respect among the people. By the end of the meeting, the leader changed his mind and permitted me to stay.

The Peace Corps office asked me to write a series of articles about my time in La Compañia for their monthly newsletters. In one article I wrote, “From where I live, I can see the whole valley stretch away below me. In the evening, if I wait patiently, I can see the snow-covered volcanoes as the clouds drift past, including Cotopaxi, Iliniza, and Quilindaña. At night I can see the tiny lights of Salcedo in the far distance. It is a peaceful area. The Indians are friendly to me. I am happy here.”

The happiness came after passing through some terrifying times in the beginning. When I first moved into the community toward the end of August 1975, the people treated me with fear and hostility, suspicious of my motives for wanting to live among them. At times I feared for my life.

Fortunately, I had met Pilar, the Spanish-speaking itinerant teacher, soon after arriving in La Compañia. She proved to be a powerful ally in helping me become accepted by the people.

The first few days no one spoke to me, they just looked at the ground as I walked by. The only ones to talk to me were the drunks. A drunken lady came up to me and said something in a menacing voice in Quechua. Not understanding her words but seeing her toothless sneer, I could only imagine the horrible things she was saying to me.

During that first terrifying week, three drunken men came to the hacienda where I stayed and asked for something to eat. I brought out some freshly baked bread that I had cooked in the little oven I had made using a large tin can placed over the wood stove. I cut a slice for each of the men. The spokesman for the group told the men not to eat the bread. He turned to me and belligerently told me to eat it first.

The teacher later said that they thought I might have bewitched the bread or poisoned it. Of course I ate my slice of bread, showing what I thought were convincing signs of great relish. The drunken man was not convinced. He asked me in broken Spanish, ‘What’s in it?’ I began to list milk, eggs… He didn’t let me finish. He said menacingly, ‘I don’t see any milk and eggs. You’re lying. There’s just wheat in this bread. Show me the milk and eggs.’ I was convinced he was going to attack me.

Fortunately, an old Indian man happened to be walking home up the mountain. He saw what was going on and barked at the men in Quechua, words that I didn’t understand. They immediately became docile, hid their bread under their ponchos, and looked at the ground. I used this opportunity to make a quick exit and let out a sigh of relief.

Another similar experience happened during that week on a Saturday. It was just becoming night. I was in my room lighting the candles when I heard someone walk into the house. I went to the front room and saw a man standing in the doorway. Through the window I spotted the dark shapes of four other men. Fear gripped my insides and took my breath away.

These young men were not from La Compañia. They had probably come from Cusubamba, a town an hour away on foot. It was hard to tell if they were Indians or poor mestizos, the distinction being very small where I lived.

I gathered up all my courage, stood in front to the man’s path so he couldn’t enter any further, crossed my arms, mimicking a pose of self-confidence, and forced myself to bark the Spanish equivalent of ‘Just what the hell do you think you’re doing in my house?’

The man in the doorway said, with a threatening smile on his face, ‘Just looking around.’ One of the men outside said mockingly, “Doesn’t the Señorita want to practice her Quechua with us?”

I felt frozen with fear, but managed to fake some self-assurance. I threatened them with everything I could think of, saying that if they didn’t leave this minute I would tell the priest, the police, and their bosses to make sure they’d lose their jobs in Quito. The guy in the doorway turned around and walked outside, making sure to take his time. I didn’t wait to see where they went.

The hacienda had no front door. I had hung a thick piece of fabric in the doorway. Before going to bed, I pushed a heavy piece furniture against the doorway to impede entry. I passed a sleepless night with my hunting knife at my side, a gift from a former Navajo boyfriend.

Those were hard times for me. Fortunately, they only lasted a few days, thanks to the schoolteacher’s influence in the community.

Gradually, as the days wore on, the hostility of the people turned to simple shyness. One day, as I walked home from the Wednesday market in Cusubamba, I sucked on a fruit call sapote. A young girl about twelve years old passed me, driving her pigs to the market. I offered her a piece of fruit. She seemed very pleased. I told her to come and get it. She said no. She finally told me to put it on the ground. She still didn’t come and get it. I knew she was afraid of me, so I walked away. I looked back and saw her run up and grab the fruit and run a few yards down the mountain. When she was quite far away she yelled, ‘Dios lo pagui,’ broken Spanish for ‘May God repay you.’

From that experience with the fruit, I learned to use fruit to lure the children to come closer and closer to me. They grabbed the fruit and then ran away. It was usually the girls who showed the most bravery. After a few days of leaving the piece of fruit on the ground with increasingly less distance between the fruit and me, I finally left an orange in my lap. The bravest of the girls crawled into my lap, took the orange and bit into it while the juice ran down her smiling face. From that moment, the children lost their shyness.

In the newsletter I wrote, “The shyness continues to wear away as I work side by side with the people in the mingas—community work days in which everyone contributes his service to better the area, a custom dating from the time of the Incas. Recently the people have been working on building Pilar’s brand new schoolhouse.

“I’ve been here about three weeks and already the people have made a complete turnaround in their attitude toward me. Almost every day I get several invitations for lunch in one of the chozas, the mud-bricked, thatch-roofed houses that dot the side of the mountain.

“The lunch is usually a huge caldron of thick soup called mazamorra, made with every edible kind of plant that is cultivated in the area, including barley, quinoa, potatoes, onions, and sometimes corn. The soup often serves as both breakfast and lunch. The people don’t eat much meat. They sell their sheep and pigs at the nearest town to make some money. They also raise guinea pigs inside their homes and only eat them on special occasions, like a marriage or other celebrations.

“During my visits, the girls like to sit in my lap and pat my body, pinch my skin to see if the white color comes off, and look for lice in my scalp. I learned quickly that looking for lice is a way of showing friendship. Thankfully, they didn’t find any.”

Men and women began coming to my house to talk of their troubles. They told me how angry they were because they discovered that the landowner paid them lower than the minimum wage mandated by law of fifty cents a day. I could have easily told them they could make a legal complaint in Quito in the office of land reform, but I was too afraid my landlord would find out I was causing trouble. I simply lent a sympathetic ear to the people. The next time the landowner came to pay the people’s monthly wages, a group representing the entire community came to him and told him they were angry and were not going to work anymore if he didn’t raise their wages. The very next day he raised their wages to 40 cents a day. Maybe the landowner feared being killed, similar to what happened to a landowner from the same general area a decade before. Thankfully, he didn’t accuse me of causing the commotion.

Over time, I began to regard the little room I had in the hacienda as rather nice, just a little on the dark side. There was a bed, chest-of-drawers, cupboard, and table with my little makeshift stove on top. That room was my refuge when times were rough outside. At first the rat situation was very depressing. These rats were a large variety about the size of a small cat. They were bold and even came out during the day. Sometimes I stayed awake at night for fear they were going to jump onto my bed. I put out poison. After a few days, none of the rates ate it anymore. They are smart animals and learn very quickly.

One night, after an especially frustrating day in the beginning of my stay, while I was reading in my bed with the candles lit, a big rat waddled across the straw mat toward my bed. I made a noise hoping to frighten it away. It kept coming. Something broke inside of me, and out came a flood of tears, accompanied by all the strongest insults I could think of in Spanish, Quechua, and English, along with a book I threw at the rat.

I slept well that night, relieved of a lot of pent-up frustration and anger. Like everything else, the rat situation improved radically over time. I followed the suggestion of another Peace Corps volunteer and put steel wool in all the holes.

The water, on the other hand, continued to be a problem. It had to be hauled from the irrigation ditch above the hacienda. It came out very dark and muddy. After filtering and boiling, the water looked yellow and tasted like dirt.

The hacendado opened up the room with a toilet during one of his monthly visits. I had to haul the water from the irrigation ditch to flush it. Before the toilet became available, I relieved myself in a hidden nook in the fields, like everyone else around here. With an old metal bowl I found on one of the shelves, I dug a makeshift latrine and then left the bowl nearby to throw dirt into the little pit after each use. The scraggly dogs gathered every morning outside, waiting for me to relieve myself. As soon as I walked away from the latrine, the dogs eagerly dug up the fecal feast. For some unknown reason, they preferred my feces over what was available elsewhere. Maybe it had something to do with the nutritional content—or maybe they simply preferred foreign flavor.

After a few weeks of living in this community, I discovered that I had dead round worms a foot long in my stools. The thought of harboring worms thoroughly disgusted me, yet the scientist in me also found the worms fascinating. I wanted to show my Peace Corps friends these creatures. I got a stick and pulled out a couple of the longest worms I could find, rinsed them off, and laid the fat, pink-colored worms out on the porch railing. I forgot about the sun, which made them shrivel up into unimpressive little worms, not worthy of show-and-tell.

The Peace Corps office gave me de-worming pills, similar to the kind given to dogs. I had to take the worm medication a few times during my stay on the mountain. I trained myself never to touch the dogs when they came around me, but I still kept getting re-infested anyway.

I wrote, “My project—my reason for being in La Compañia—is to gather local legends in Quechua, which will later be made into a Quechua-Spanish textbook to use in bilingual schools. Pilar is also helping me put together a dictionary of the local dialect.

“Now that the children are no longer afraid of me—or my tape recorder—they love to come and tell me stories in Quechua about their lives. The girls like to sit in my lap. The boys are more reserved and stand nearby. I record them as they speak, then I play the recording back to them. They squeal with wonder and delight and look at each other with disbelief. Of course I don’t understand much of the stories they’re recounting, but I feel the children’s excitement when they hear themselves tell their stories.

“When Pilar returns to the community, she listens to the tape recordings and then transcribes the stories onto paper. The final step will be translating the stories into Spanish. We’re starting to accumulate almost enough stories for a schoolbook. We intend to have Quechua on one side of the page and Spanish on the other when our little textbook is published someday in Quito.

“Last week a boy invited me to eat lunch in his choza. The boy, called Juan, is my friend and one of my informants for the Quechua language. He has good stories to tell for our bilingual textbook. He told me that he lives with his mother and his little baby sister, Marta, who had gotten sick and would probably die. His mother doesn’t have any money to take the baby to a doctor.

“Juan told me his father died a few months ago after he got drunk and fell off a wall doing construction work in Quito. After he died, Juan’s brother left home at the age of 12 to look for work in Quito to support the family.

“Juan is ten years old and in the first grade. He couldn’t go to school when he was younger because his mother needed his help at home. Juan told me his mother cries every night because she is so scared something will happen to the older boy who supports the family. She is afraid they will starve to death.

“I brought the family some of my food. I also brought an aspirin from my first aid kit. I crushed the aspirin and then gave the mother a tiny grain to give to her sick baby. I said the benediction while making the sign of the cross on the baby’s forehead. The next day the mother told her son to tell me that the baby was healed. I didn’t believe that an aspirin could heal a sick baby. I thought it must be a coincidence.

“Since then, mothers have been bringing their babies so I can “heal” them. I feel like such a fake, but somehow they seem to get well pretty quickly. There is some kind of healing force at work, but it’s not coming from me or from my crushed grains of aspirin or my phony benedictions. Nevertheless, mothers bring me roasted guinea pigs on a stick as thank you presents. The idea of eating these little animals that look like skewered rats made me feel waves of nausea, but I ate them anyway, remembering the warnings of the Peace Corps officials about not rejecting food when it was offered.

“The next day, a young boy called Julian came to my hacienda and called out to me, saying that his mother wanted me to come for lunch. We walked far down the mountain and over a hill to reach his choza. All the chozas look the same to a newcomer like me. They have one, big square room made out of adobe with a roof of straw tied to a frame, and a dirt floor. There are no windows, only a hole for the smoke to escape. Two chozas in each compound stand next to each other at right angles. One is used for cooking, storing, and as a general work area. The other is for sleeping.

“Julian held my hand as he guided me inside the choza. I couldn’t see anything for a moment until my eyes adjusted to the dim light. I smelled the soup simmering in an immense, blackened pot that hung from a metal stand over the fire in the center of the room on the dirt floor. His younger sister stirred the pot continuously as the food cooked, while the younger brother played outside.

“All around the edge of the walls stood an assortment of earthen jugs with grains and corn inside. A straw mat supported by branches served as a bed for somebody—or several people. A pair of chaps made of sheepskin hung from a pole.

“After we ate, and after I had asked a steady stream of questions about the names of the objects I saw in the choza, we went outside and sat down among the stalks of harvested barley to enjoy the sunny day. While I was admiring the view of the valley below, the three children gathered around me to explore my body. First they began with my hair. I was thoroughly searched for lice by Carmencita who made many little parts to expose my scalp.

“The children asked me endless questions, like where was my husband and where were my children, and why was my skin white and theirs dark. When they got tired of asking questions, they continued examining my body. Carmencita brought out all her ribbons, her comb carved out of horn, and a pail of water. She made dozens of inch long braids in my hair. After it was all finished, she stood back and took a look. She didn’t like it and took it out. Then all three of them ran their hands over my arms, commenting on each mole or freckle, scar, and vein.

“When their explorations brought them to my chest, they talked about my breasts without even a trace of embarrassment. Among the indigenous people, breasts do not seem to be sexual symbols as they are in American culture. It is common to see women walking about with their breast partly or all the way exposed, even when they are not nursing.

“Julian cupped his hands and reached for my breasts very innocently. Then he asked if he could see them. I said I’d rather not open my blouse. Carmencita opened the top two buttons anyway and peeped down my blouse. She reached her hand in and squeezed, then looked at me and said, ‘no milk.’ She asked if she could suck on them anyway. I said ‘no,’ that I didn’t want to open my blouse. She said she didn’t mind and started to suck with the blouse and all. I have seen children as old as ten suck every once in a while on their mother’s breast.

“When the children got tired of looking me over, we went to the edge of the choza to watch Carmencita make a shigra, a woven bag made out of plant fibers. As she was teaching me, we conversed in elementary Quechua, since practicing, after all, was the main object of my visit. The children intermittently sprinkle Spanish words throughout their conversations.

“As the afternoon wore on, it became time for me to walk back up the mountain and work on the transcribing the legends I was gathering, transferring them from tape to paper.

“On Wednesdays I walk to market, an hour away in Cusubamba. On the path I meet many Indians heading in the same direction. This is a happy day for most of them because it gives them a chance to get away, see friends, gossip, look at merchandise in the little plaza, relax, and get drunk. This week I was fortunate to get a ride to market in a big, rickety truck that passed me on the road. The truck bulged with people and cargo, but a familiar face looked down at me and yelled for me to jump aboard. I ran behind the slow moving truck, threw my empty pack onboard, and then grabbed a metal handrail and struggled to hoist myself up. Several people leaned over and grabbed various parts of my body, pulling me up and into the truck. The people smiled and laughed, finding me to be quite entertaining.

“We all stood cramped tightly together along with four pigs and a cow that the campesinos intended to sell in the plaza. After getting to the market and chatting among the buyers and sellers, I lugged my heavy pack back home, laden with food for the week.

“This is my life in La Compañia de Jesus Cristo. Stay tuned for the next installment in the Peace Corps newsletter.”

After a couple of months of spending almost all my time in La Compañia, I began to miss my climbing friends and our adventures in the high mountains. The next weekend, I hiked down the mountain to the paved road, caught the bus to Quito, and then picked up my two checks at the Peace Corps office. We received $120 per month for our volunteer work. From the office, I telephoned Miguel Andrade, my mountaineering friend and the best friend of Hugo Torres. We made a plan to meet up.

I had no idea the role that Miguel would eventually play in my life in South America.