Return trip – 2024

I am excited and hopeful about returning to the Andes in July and August of 2024. My purpose this time is to reconnect after the pandemic. Priority number one is to visit the rural communities where we have recorded interviews since 2009. We’ll share access to what we have published as well as what we hope to publish next from these interviews. We promised to produce new school materials in Quechua and now we want to hear about which formats are most accessible and useful for families, teachers and researchers based in the rural Andes. Do they prefer monolingual, bilingual or trilingual versions? Print or internet versions? Illustrated or self-illustratable versions? All of the above? How can we best dovetail with the efforts of local community members and educators?

A group of us has been working hard this year to generate monolingual, bilingual as well as trilingual versions of the riddles, anecdotes and stories that we have recorded. Our group includes Quechua speaking grad students and researchers based in the Andes and US. We are using free software called Toolbox with extensive technical support by linguist Karen Buseman, and we’re learning to develop an automatic parser that also generates custom-tailored dictionary entries from the corpora we previously transcribed, translated and analyzed by hand.

Our work is heavily focused on promoting pride and study of the Quechua language. Sometimes the urgency we feel about this seems like a tangent to folks in communities. They are actively confronting other issues related to cultural and physical survival. For example, some shepherding communities in South Bolivia are working to promote their hand-weaving practices which are increasingly abandoned in favor of machine-made imitations. Yachay Simi was among funders who were invited to sponsor a weaving festival for mothers and daughters by the indigenous-led Centro de Interpretación Cultural Pujllay Tarabuco in May 2024. Here are the results: