Hilda Huarcaya
Fun Fact
As a teenager, Hilda worked as a seamstress to support her family. Later she used her talents to make clown clothes for evangelistic events.
Hilda grew up in a staunch catholic family. She loved Jesus but always felt distant from God because of the practices of the confused Quechua Catholicism which often promotes the worship of popular saints mixed with Animism. Hilda desired to go to college, but at the age of fifteen, her father died. She was forced to work to provide for her family. When she was 28, Hilda moved to Lima. At first she did not like the city because everybody looked down on her for being Quechua. One day she met Romulo Sauñe who was not ashamed of his culture, but spoke and sang in Quechua. Hilda says there was a “light” in Romulo and she wanted to know what it was. She and her mom decided to visit the church services at the Sauñe house where they both gave their lives to Jesus.
One year, Runa Simi invited literacy teachers from the USA to teach the ladies how to read and to train them as literacy teachers. She was not only trained as a teacher, but went to college and received a degree in education. Today, Hilda is an integral part of Runa Simi’s Bible Literacy Ministry.
Hilda also helps develop and translate materials into the Ayacucho Quechua language. There are very few Bible based materials in Quechua. All of Runa Simi’s programs need literature in the mother tongue. Hilda not only helps translate Bible studies and other materials, but also prints many of them in Runa Simi´s little print shop.