Having adjusted my eyes to an unfamiliar place, I moved to constructively trying to have conversations about more of the specifics of what I would be doing while in Peru. A huge part of that included getting to know the wonderfully creative and charming Patricia, one of Saphi’s cofounders. Through chatting with her and having internal conversations with my team, we were able to start planning for the kind of content that could help Saphi reach new and different audiences.
Saphi Quechua is an organisation with a clear purpose and a soul – the challenge for me was to begin thinking about how to make that clear to all the people who may be interested in Quechua and indigenous Peruvian culture, but who may not have come into contact with Saphi before. It’s no easy task. Sometimes social media can make even the most authentic things feel somehow cheapened. The challenge for my fellow scholars and I was to talk with Patricia and with each other enough to understand what Saphi is enough to give us a fighting chance to preserve that strong sense of identity even in the distorting world of social media. Because, no matter how much I sometimes distrust it, social media is capable of reaching people like nothing else and can be a tool for phenomenal good when used wisely.
We talked about Peru’s cultural heritage and its links with Quechua as a living language and discovered our initial angle for the content we would produce. We would visit some of the museums and heritage sites in the middle of Peru’s urban capital to find all the indigenous culture surrounding us in Lima, and in doing so also try to share more about the vibrantly resilient language that is Quechua. We had no idea if it would be a fruitful approach, but it seemed like the best place to start.
And we were not to be alone. We began meeting with our local volunteers who would be invaluable in guiding us on everything from Peruvian culture to the ins and outs of marketing and social media. Putting faces to names and talking about what drew us all to Saphi was very meaningful and helped us to discover our shared aims. It was in this collaborative spirit, then, that we visited Huaca Pucllana, an ancient temple site in the middle of Lima. We learned the history of the site, including all the cultures which have added to it, and discovered the Quechua words used to describe parts of the building and the traditions associated with it. Interviewing our guide at the suggestion of two of our volunteers, we were able to capture the content that would make our first video. All our talk was finally yielding tangible results!
And against this background, I continued to explore Lima. I discovered some good coffee shops and prepared for a weekend spent visiting the desert oasis of Huacachina and the city of Ica. Putting Lima into its place geographically within Peru became more important to me and I tentatively began to feel like I understood it a bit more. This grey metropolis of over 10 million people began to feel more and more familiar.