Well, it’s been awhile since I managed to get a post in. I recently finished up an hectic assignment as conference photographer in an undisclosed part of Asia, so I’ve now visited all six permanently inhabited continents. In celebration, here are a few faces from around the world:

Cusco Quechua is spoken by more than a million people in Peru. Literacy rates among Cusco Quechua speakers — particularly women — are extremely low, which has a negative effect on many women’s self-esteem. ATEK is a Quechua organization that, among many other things, trains Quechua teachers to run literacy classes in remote villages. Here’s a taste of what those classes are like:

In Peru, an organization called FAIENAP — Fraternidad de Asociaciones de Iglesias Evangélicas Nativas de la Amazonía Peruana (Brotherhood of Associations of Evangelical Native Churches of the Peruvian Amazon) — is running an Old Testament translation project for six languages that already have the New Testament. Here’s a glimpse of the project in pictures (slideshow runs about five minutes and requires JavaScript):

Translators working on the project have moved with their families to the FAIENAP headquarters near Pucallpa, Peru. The adjustment has been and continues to be very difficult for them, they told me when I visited on Tuesday.

In the villages where they are from, they grow, hunt, and catch virtually all of the food that they eat. They have gardens to work and rivers in which to bathe. But in town, they have to buy all their food, which is extremely strange and difficult to do. One man described showers as “dungeons” compared with the rivers he’s used to at home.

Too, the people come from totally different languages and cultures. After dinner, a woman might take leftover food to share with her neighbor from a different people group. “Take that away, I have enough myself!” the neighbor would say. Both women ended up with hurt feelings because neither understood the other’s cultural point of view.

But they haven’t given up. They’ve stuck with it, learning to love each other and continuing the translation process. How many of us would’ve done the same? They’re really amazing people.

CSS Photo Shuffler designed by Carl Camera.

Last week, my colleague Abe Koop and I visited a small Quechua village called Llihuari (say yee-WAH-ree) in the Huánuco Department of Peru.

Several million Quechua people live in Peru, primarily in the Andes Mountains. Their languages are related to that of the great Inca Empire, which controlled a huge territory in South America prior to Spanish contact and conquest. Here, a Pillco (Huallaga) Quechua woman invites us into her kitchen to have lunch.

The meal consisted of greens and boiled potatoes. The Andean peoples first domesticated potatoes thousands of years ago, and the tubers remain a dietary staple. They also domesticated the guinea pig or cuy (say COO-ee) and allow the little animals to roam free in the kitchen — until a birthday or some other special occasion calls for a special treat of, yes, guinea pig!

As, Abe and I munched on our boiled potatoes, skin and all, I noticed the boy beside me peeling the skin off of his potatoes. I assumed that he was just being a kid, but I was wrong. A few minutes later, somebody told us that only pigs eat potato skins. Augh! Everybody (ourselves included) had a good laugh at the “gringos”….

I got back to Lima this evening after an all-day bus ride from Huánuco, Peru. I might have time to post a few pictures tomorrow, but I’m not sure — we’re leaving again around noon.

Since leaving Dallas on Feb. 18, I haven’t been in one place longer than about four days at a time. Here’s a map giving a rough idea of my travels so far:

Yesterday, we visited CILTA — Curso Internacional de Lingüística, Traducción y Alfabetización (International Course in Linguistics, Translation, and Literacy) — at the University of Ricardo Palma in Lima, Peru.

This year, 10 students from Peru, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Costa Rica, and other Latin American countries are taking the course to equip themselves for language work and community development among minority peoples in their home countries or overseas. Approximately 60 CILTA graduates are scattered around the world today working as field linguists, teachers, literacy specialists, etc.

We had fun visiting with the students after class. Most of them are my age or a little older, and they were very kind in encouraging me to use my lousy Spanish. It’s embarrassing and frustrating that I can’t speak or understand well, but that’s a topic for another post!

Hello from southeastern Paraguay, just about 60 miles from the Brazilian border. This is farm country; the soybean fields stretch as far as you can see in any direction. We’re staying in a little town called Naranjal, which was settled by Brazilian immigrants 30 or 40 years ago when the land opened up for farming.

Before European settlers came to plant soybeans, this land was rainforest, and home to the Aché people, an ancient hunter-gather society who lived in small family groups deep in the forest. But as the forests fell around them, the people had little choice but to abandon their way of life during the 1960s and ’70s. Today they live on six small reservations in eastern Paraguay.

The Aché people’s past is finished, gone with the forest that was their home. How do they respond? How do we? Rage, fear, sadness, helplessness, optimism, joy, excitement, hope — surely all are appropriate. Such immense ecological and sociological change must not be simplified or depicted in absolute terms.

Victor Gómez, a Paraguayan professor, is leading a team to translate the New Testament and part of the Old Testament into Aché by 2015. He and his team hope that their efforts will help the next chapter of Aché history end in triumph, not in sadness. But for now, the pages are blank; the future has not yet been written.

It’s the end of summer here in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The air is warm and sticky, but today, it’s pouring down rain. Buenos Aires is about as far south as Sydney, Australia, and Capetown, South Africa.

We’ve spent the last few days visiting with Leo Vartanian, director of LETRA Argentina. LETRA is short for Latinoamericanos en Traducción y Alfabetización, or Latin Americans in Translation and Literacy.

The organization is fairly young, and as its name indicates, is focused on involving Argentines in translation and literacy work both here in Argentina, in nearby countries like Paraguay, and in far-flung locations like Papua New Guinea.

Buenos Aires is a huge metropolitan area with a population roughly equivalent to that of Los Angeles, California (approx. 13 million). There’s a subway system (here called the subte) that we ride sometimes, and the streets are busy with cars, buses, and pedestrians.

The city is diverse, home to immigrants from all over Europe and the rest of the world. So you see last names like Schramm, Bianchi, and Li, but the uniting language is Spanish. Designer pizza is one of the specialty foods here, and all civilized people eat it with a knife and fork — knife in the right hand and fork in the left. It’s really delicious.

This evening, we’re hopping on a bus for Paraguay, where we’ll spend the next week before returning on to Argentina and continuing to Chile.

Today is my third day in Costa Rica. We spent the morning at the Paraguayan embassy obtaining visas for our upcoming trip to Paraguay. The ambassador was very nice and helped us right away, so now I have a multiple-entry visa for Paraguay that’s good for the next seven years! I may never get a chance to use it again, but it’s nice to think that I can if I want to.

The Wycliffe Americas office and the apartment I’m sharing are in a neighborhood called Moravia, not too far from downtown San José (Costa Rica’s capital). The apartment has a nicer shower than mine at home! I’m enjoying new foods like dulce de leche, a thick, caramel-like sauce used in pastries, and tasty Salvadorian pupusas. We get around on foot, by bus, or in friends’ cars.

I’ll be visiting Argentina, Paraguay, and Chile with my colleague Tom Van Wynen, who grew up in Bolivia and (thankfully) is fluent in Spanish. It’s been a bit overwhelming being dropped into a Spanish-speaking environment. I’ve studied Spanish on and off through my life, but always in fairly academic settings — very little real-world practice. So I try hard to understand what’s being said — sometimes doing pretty well and other times not — but I’m afraid to try speaking. I need to get over that and just talk, I guess. Hopefully I’ll be a lot better off by the end of these two months in Latin America.

Anyway, I’m really excited about this upcoming trip to the Southern Cone. We’ll be visiting remote rural Paraguay as part of a sociolinguistic survey team — we think. Plans are somewhat fluid here, so we learn just to show up and see what unfolds. I’ll have sporadic internet access, so I should be able to blog periodically. The adventure begins tomorrow afternoon as we head for the airport.