No, this is not one of those syrupy posts about learning from other cultures. But, it is a reminiscence of an encounter I had with an older Quechua man up in the Andes mountains.
For those of you who are not aware, my wife and I were missionaries in the southern part of Perú in the Andes mountains. On our second term there, I ended up traveling into the Colca Canyon to a village called Choco every few weeks. At that time, to get there was a close to eight hour trip, part of it riding on a mule, part of it walking. By the way, we are talking about a trip with elevations that ranged from 8,000 to 11,000 feet.
The Quechua themselves could walk the entire trail without needing to get on a mule at all. And they could do it in six hours while taking a meal break during the trip. What amazed me was that this was a trail that I considered difficult. This is an area of Perú where one can see the famous Inca terraced farming. The terraced farming was a way that the Inca turned a desert area with a river flowing down the canyon into an area that was able to support over 25,000 people when the Spanish first arrived. Sadly, that is no longer true, but many parts of the Inca terraced farming still exist in the Colca Canyon. In fact, the Choco Quechua people used terraced farming.
But, because it is a desert area, the trail is dirt, rock, and slippery shale. I never quite fully learned how to walk that trail. There were segments of the trail that were sloped. I would have trouble with slipping and sliding. Meantime, the Quechua would walk it without problem. I asked them how they did it and they tried to train me. They talked about looking ahead and how to plant my feet correctly. The reality is that I would have had to live and walk in that canyon in order to really learn how to walk that trail correctly. A visit once every few weeks was insufficient.
What makes it worse is that once a year the Quechua have a “marathon” in which the young Quechua run the trail. Remember that we are talking about a slippery trail, with no guard rails, mid-way down the wall of one of the deepest dry-land canyons on Earth. They could run that distance, in sandals, in about 2½ to three hours, depending on the year.
But, I really got my comeuppance on one particular trip. Near the end of the journey back, I was on a mule because I was somewhat out of breath. Meantime, this older Quechua had been watching me. He finally spoke to me and asked me my age. I was then in my late 40’s, almost 50. He looked at me, told me he was 61 and that he was still able to walk the trail. It was rather obvious that he did not think much of my capabilities.
I found myself thinking of all that I was able to do. I could (and can still) build a computer from separate parts. I am fairly good with quite a few different bits of software. I hold graduate degrees. Yada, yada, yada, you get the idea. But, you see, I could not do one of the most important things in that culture. I could not walk the trail. I also could not farm in the Inca terraced style. I could not take care of a mule. All I did was ride one of them, but I never had to take care of it. I did not know how to herd llama and alpaca. I was really rather useless in that culture.
Bottom line? Essentially every Quechua in that village was “smarter” than I was. They could all do things that I could not do. I was the obviously uneducated person. In passing, yes, they recognized that in the city I could do many things they could not. But, out there? I was uneducated in what was important for living successfully in that culture.
And, that is a good lesson to keep in mind.
Mr. Obregon, this reminds me of exactly what I experienced in rural Honduras during a missions trip there in 2005! Since most of our travel had to be on foot, we trudged steep, rugged, muddy trails for hours a day getting between far-flung homes where we were helping the Hondurans put on new roofs. It was strenuous & exhausting even for young, physically fit track athletes, and we constantly lagged behind old men & children (even a 3 legged dog!) who bounded ahead of us. It was definitely humbling & brought out the sense of humor in the Hondurans who graciously waited for us. I felt like it leveled the playing field, in a way; yes, we brought the cash to fund their projects, but they were the ones who knew how to live & thrive in that environment!
I was once discussing with a group of people the difficulty in having an IQ test that wasn’t c ulturally biased, and one person said that the Bushmen (hunter-gatherer people) of the Kalahari desert were a case in point. Many IQ tests try to be culturally neutral by using diagrams and geometric figures rather than words. But the Bushmen of the Kalahary had great difficulty in perceiving a right-angle. For people who grew up in cities it was second nature — all buildings had corners, most were rectangular. But in the desert where the Bushmen grew up there were no right-angles — not even the horizon was straight. But they could tell at a glance the differences between different kinds of plants that trained botanists from the cities had to take back to their laboratories to do tests on first.