[continued]
Indeed, that was one of the lessons that the Auburn students took home with them — to recognize that their own priorities were not always the same as those of the Quechua they had come to serve — that sometimes they met, and sometimes they didn’t.

“You can’t go to Lowe’s for a piece of PVC — most of the everyday materials you see here are local, in an economy that is for the most part not based on money,” one team member remarked. “It is also humbling to realize we’re students, and that we will fail in some of our attempts.”

Duke adds, “What we’re doing here is important . . . we are teaching students who are not yet engineers how to become engineers, and it’s not like getting an A or a B or a C; the people who live here are going to depend on the solutions our students find to these engineering problems. Food security is a real issue here.”

And so the week goes, as the hydroponics unit and the field surveys take shape. The astonishment of the first couple of days in the Andes has led to a slow awakening of some of the patterns of life in Quesimpuco: gathering the harvest in the day, watching the morning and evening “commute” of the herders as they seek forage for their sheep and goats. Surely the shepherds’ lives will be easier when their day is less disturbed by visitors like us — whom they don’t call westerners but northerners.

At the end of the last day, gifts and honors are distributed in the bunkhouse. Suddenly you realize that the people you have been working with all week — such as Casimiro, a Quechua who heads a 40-man village water association — are friends now, gathered around a table that is sometimes separated by language, but never by spirit.

We leave at three in the morning, the last opportunity to see stars spilling into the southern sky. We crawl past the brown adobe houses with their small windows, the switchbacks in the road so tight that we see headlights from our other vehicles on the road as often as we see taillights. At 14,000 feet, the car struggles like it is out of breath. There are a few drifts of snow, and the temperature is in the mid-teens in the early mountain air.

A couple of hours south of La Paz a throttle cable goes out on one of the SUV’s carrying us back. Not a problem for Isaac and Benjo, who pull a couple of extra cables out of a box of spares. Aided by Huber Ramos, who is also affiliated with CENATEC, they find that neither one fits. But a little bit of filing here, and some crimping there, and we are back on the road with a working fix. Illimani comes back into view along the dusty road, and La Paz again shows itself. Nobody has had a shower for a week, and now they’re just ahead.

But then nobody really seems to care that they missed these western comforts. Nobody got dirty so much as they became, in a way, much fresher and ready to face a new day, and to make a new bridge across cultures that don’t usually meet. In a real way this Auburn team was able to do just that. In the week they worked in Quesimpuco, they were not just students, but guests and partners, teachers and learners, builders and engineers.

They were something else as well — the face of Auburn.

[miniflickr photoset_id=72157631952462015&sortby=date-posted-asc&per_page=50]