Our guide was unabashedly from our world. Ricardo Betancourt, a successful builder and restaurant owner from Juarez, was on a mission to help the Tarahumara help themselves. Chihuahuans have long seen Tarahumarans on their city streets in the wake of periodic droughts. They've heard the Indians tell stories of dying and malnourished children. Dryland corn and bean plots on the Tarahumarans' remote and scattered homesteads are the main link to life for most.
Small springs provide drinking water, but the people depend upon rain to give life to their crops.
By the fall of 1994, drought conditions for the Tarahumara were considered the worst in 40 years. Infant deaths from malnutrition rose 300 percent, with 34 children known to have died in a two-month period. No substantial relief came from the weather in 1995. The homesteads house people suspicious of the outside world. They have lived in the region for no less than 2,000 years.