Quechua is both a language, and the name given to the indigenous people that speak the language in countries that include Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and to a lesser degree in Brazil, Chile and Argentina. It was during this time that I had my first opportunity to experience one of the indigenous populations that has influenced my thinking and teachings today-the Quechua of the high Andes and Lake Titicaca region. The tourism and pressures of commercialization was still relatively new. While the indigenous people of the Andes today struggle to maintain their traditions in the presence of a modern world, there was less of a need to do so in 1989. The year was 1989 and the Peru of that time was very different from the Peru of today. Twenty-three years later I took the vacation time that I had earned from my corporate job and made my first pilgrimage to the Andes Mountains of Southern Peru. I knew that I would explore each of them at some point in my life, I just didn’t know when. I spent my days after school and summer vacations pouring through as many books as I could digest. One of accounts that was especially luring to me at the time was the story of Hiram Bingham’s expeditions into the high Andes of Peru and his 1911 discovery of the legendary city of Machu Picchu.
I was fascinated by the accounts of explorers such as Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of the fabled City of Troy. In the basement of their midwestern home, they had rows and rows of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, filled with alphabetically-sorted books describing ancient and “lost” civilizations of the past. So I believe it was no accident that the family members that cared for my brother and me when my father left us in the 1960s were passionate students of ancient history. “I’ve always believed that the universe has a way of putting us in just the right place, at just the right time, to access what we need on our life’s path.
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