48 years

In the Andean tradition, 48 years is a perfect and large number, powerful and pleasant.

For us it is a gift. To know that we are humbly alive and walking without giving up or complaining, with encouragement and stirring, with courage and contentment, accompanied by our living and our dead.

This March 31 we celebrate 48 years of journeying: we always have to thank the accompanying people and ask for amends for our mistakes.

In 1996, when we turned 25, our brother Juan Medcalf visited us to share the moment: he had left Cajamarca in 1982 and found himself in another experience ... Back in his native England, he wrote the article "Awakening in The Andes". Here a fragment:

"The occasion of my beginning with the coca was in a recent visit to Cajamarca, in the Andes of northern of Peru. A Network of 500 rural librarians was celebrating 25 years of activity and I, as its long-absent founder, had been invited to 3 days (and nights) of joint celebration at almost 3000 meters above sea level. The experience was an awakening to realities that I scarcely imagined as a young and inexperienced missionary.

My first insinuation of profound change was on the opening night. The inaugural greetings were given not in Spanish, the language imposed on the natives for about 500 years, but in the ancient Quechua language of the Inca civilization, supposedly condemned to extinction with the assassination of the Inca Atahualpa in 1533.

That night, for many hours, I savoured the bitter-sweet delights of the sacred coca leaves next to several hundred men and women from distant Andean communities. We sat in a circle, interweaving present, past and future in a fabric of realism. Many of them understood concepts such as the globalization of the economy and the commercial control of the media. Many of their brothers and sisters had left the mountains for the bright lights of Lima, where their identity would be lost in an opaque McDonaldized megalopolis of 7 million inhabitants. Their response was positive and was filled with a hope that can only be born of suffering ... "