This will be a short entry because I am leaving at 4:30 in the morning for Ccotatocclla.
I am excited because I heard from my friends Martin and Hipolito that the family I will be staying with, and their community, speaks a different kind of Quechua from Cusco Quechua. It is more like Bolivian Quechua, they say; more mixed or influenced by Aymara.
I told them the joke that the difference between a language and a dialect is an army and a navy (Max Weinreich?) In other words, whoever has power gets to claim their variety of speech is the standard.
It will be cool to learn this variety of Quechua since it may serve me better in South Bolivia later as well.

The other quick thing I want to say is that my indigenous partners in this endeavor are truly experts…experts regarding pedagogy, regarding the communication of their identity to others, regarding the structure of their language and artful ways of speaking. When I am writing proposals it often must sound like I am proposing to “bring” them something, but actually I am sure I will be learning much more from them than they from me. It would take a lifetime of work to amass the kind of expertise they have.