Western
Jurisdiction
United Methodist Volunteers
In Mission
By Glenn Waltman
One evening after working on the new library at Kusayapu, a Methodist school at 5500 feet high on the altiplano, (high plain) our Volunteer in Mission team gathered in one of the dorm rooms after installing ceiling lights in the new library. Ramon was invited to demonstrate his skills with musical instruments and to show his watercolor paintings.
But first, he told how he had grown up in an Aymara village and had lived most of his life with people who grew most of their own food, wove most of their own clothing, and built musical instruments from wood and reeds.
Then Ramon began playing one of many pipes. The haunting music cut through the twilight streaming into the room. He told how ancient people would make pipes from pepper trees growing along river banks, or other wood alongside high lakes. The holes in the pipes were for small fingers for Aymaran were small people, seldom growing taller than five feet four.
Picking up an instuments made of reeds, Ramon told how modern musical groups added more reeds to the five or six first used, to have a wider range of sound. Ancient people cut the reeds from along the river banks or that grew in the high lakes. Today folk singers play most of the music now heard on CD's or tapes, using much different and more complicated sounds than were used by his ancestors.
When asked about his own people, Ramon told how they often were discriminated against by Chilean, Peruvian or Bolivian people, especially when they migrated into cities or searched for work in the mines. For instance, he told how the local students laughed at him when he first entered the university in Iquique, a city of 200,000. He was "different," they said. He was shorter and darker in skin and had features "strange:" to the Castillian or Spanish peoples who were their ancestors. But since most of the ancient peoples had been wiped out by disease or warfare or ignorance of early missionaries, Ramon and his Aymaran friends felt themselves left out.
Still, Ramon had one hidden talent that brought fellow students to accept him--his musical skills that could play their favorite instrument, the guitar, as well two dozen other instruments. Besides he was an artist using his watercolors to paint some of their favorite scene on the ocean or inland. He bridged the gap widened by discrimination, so that at times it disappeared.
Volunteers in Mission who visited the high plateau villages of Pachica where Kusaypau was built, or nearby at Tarapaca, where the oldest Catholic Church in Latin America was located, discovered how rich the areas were both to ancient peoples and to modern day visitors. With the help of Ramon and his friends they learned how everyone became enriched with gifts from each period of time. The school at Pachica was started when the Chilean government wanted to include Aymaran in a modern school system, so they teamed up with Methodists to find and build the school. With the help of Stan and Beryl Moore, missionaries with the Board of Global Ministries, the site was found in l99l and since then 13 graduating classes have gone out to become teachers, agricultural experts, social workers and nurses.
Aymaran students at Kusaupau now live in the valley where their ancestors once thrived, and learn their ancient language as well as something about its culture. They share with local students from Pachica who are also Aymaran, and develop skills that will be used in the future.
Ramon becomes a symbol of Chile's future, rich with ancient history and modern livelihood, growing in Christian love and grace as a whole host of people from nearby communities and faraway places come together to work as Christ's hands in a troubled world. They remember Christ's first words at Nazareth when he began his ministry, quoting Isaiah, "God's spirit is on me; he's chosen me to Preach the Message of good news to the poor..." Message translation.
The early church began when the "poor" became God's instrument that sent that message across the world, and is needed today to bring peace, love and grace to a violent world.