The dusty road to Norogachi offered a three-hour, 70-mile descent into broken country from the Chihuahuan tourist town of Creel, known for Tarahumara Indian crafts. It was clear the Chevy Suburban wouldn't make the Catholic mission before nightfall. Through the dusky light, a solitary, draped figure cast eyes outward as if looking into a dream. As we passed, she was as still as the stony spires that punctuated the landscape. This was the best evidence that we were in a very different place indeed--the land of the Tarahumara.

The stony gaze of the Tarahumara Indians of southeastern Chihuahua could signal disregard for the outside world, reverie from herbal remedies or homemade corn liquor, or just the fact that they live on another plane of existence.

They call themselves Raramuri, meaning footrunners, and are legendary for feats of seemingly superhuman endurance. Tarahumarans have been reported to run 70 miles a day, day after day, and 170 miles without stopping. Tarahumaran mail carriers were said to run 500 miles in a week. A 100-mile ultramarathon held in Colorado in 1992 was won by a 55-year-old Tarahumaran recruited to run there. Such endurance, it is commonly argued, must be rooted in the mind. And the journeys of the Tarahumaran mind, those who study the tribe agree, are very different than our own.

Descending through the night past several silent sentinel figures, some stone, some human, was like entering a wondrous underworld for me and NMSU's College of Agriculture and Home Economics faculty who came to Chihuahua that day. 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. The last 400 have been a struggle to keep dreaded intruders at bay. Jesuit missionaries found this Uto-Aztecan culture, with the same scattered homestead pattern, when they arrived in 1607. The Indians were soon slave labor in Spanish mines. Rebellions ensued, along with brutal reprisals, during much of the 17th century.

When New Spain became Mexico, the Law of Colonization encouraged further encroachment of settlers on Tarahumaran land, pushing them back further into the reaches of remote canyons. Crushed by force, Tarahumarans responded by withdrawing geographically and personally. To this day, Tarahumarans reserve derogatory names for intruders from the Mexican culture who enter their land to cut timber or settle near lumber roads.

Betancourt spearheads Tarahumaran projects for the new Social Fund of Chihuahuan Business Owners. These entrepreneurs, remarkably, lobbied to have the state government tax them with the proviso that the business people themselves would administer the resulting social spending.

"If you become too independent, you become selfish," Betancourt said, explaining his philosophy during the drive from Chihuahua City to Creel. "If you become selfish, it is the beginning of your demise. The only way you don't become too independent is to work with people."

Success in working with people, the business owners are convinced, requires keeping the bureaucracy at arm's length. Hence, we non-Mexicans were a perfect complement to the independent business owners. Betancourt was ramrodding the group's first major program effort, after a year of brick and mortar projects that included a school dormitory and clinic building in Creel, serving the Tarahumara.

Betancourt hoped NMSU could break the cycle of hunger by living up to the Fund's motto: "A friend is one who mends the broken wing of a bird and teaches it to fly again."

Intense about his mission, he used the drive to Creel to learn everything he could about the Cooperative Extension Service from Miley Gonzalez, assistant dean and deputy director of NMSU's Extension. Betancourt's eyes widened with enthusiasm for what was for him a fresh idea. "This is exactly what we need," he said.

Countless well-meaning expatriates to Tarahumaran country have not been able to solve the hunger problem. It is a daunting task. There are 60,000 Tarahumara and related tribal peoples scattered across 35,000 square miles of rugged ridges and canyons, including Copper Canyon, renowned as deeper than the Grand Canyon. The terrain varies from 2,000 to 9,000 feet in elevation and in good years may receive 20 inches of rain.

The Jesuit mission at Norogachi, like missions around the world, had fresh-faced youngsters from their boarding school at our car doors in the dim light to greet us with smiles and well-practiced handshakes. The anticipation in the air was not for us, but for the arrival of their kin from the countryside to celebrate 50 years since the Jesuits' return to Norogachi.

The Catholic Church was unforgiven by turn-of-the-century revolutionaries for their role in colonizing Mexico. Dubbed collaborators with the oppressors, the Jesuits were unceremoniously booted out of the region by Pancho Villa and his followers. The relationship with the post-revolutionary federal government has never been comfortable since.

Tarahumarans, on the other hand, plan to dance all night to celebrate the Jesuits' return. The following day, brightly clad Tarahumaran women and men in headbands begin to appear on the hard rock outcropping that holds the mission compound. Walking through the compound, I learn what it is like to be regarded as an imposing but inanimate object.

Betancourt has organized a fact-finding session that will bring together state Indian agency representatives, church officials, Social Fund activists, NMSU scientists, and Tarahumarans themselves, including three tribal governors. The room becomes a cacophony of language: Spanish echoed by English translation, and at times, English translated to Spanish to Tarahumaran and back.

We learn that good works have been part of the landscape for a long time. Sixteen missions dot the region, including a teacher's college in Creel. The Chihuahuan government has developed 300 public schools, a third of which board students. There is a school breakfast program, and the schools work with the health department to provide vaccinations. Even agricultural progress has been introduced with 19 demonstration plots of genetically improved corn, courtesy of Saltillo University and the Asuntos Indigenes, Chihuahua's Indian agency.

Cultivars introduced from Peru could increase yields two or three times, said Pedro Peres Mata, the Indian agency's chief. He recommends that the Indians borrow hybrid seed against future harvests.

Peres oversees distribution of surplus commodities in exchange for work, as well as building projects, cottage industry creation, water development, and soil conservation programs.

Missionaries from Creel and Norogachi warned the NMSU contingent that "silver bullet" solutions to hunger never take root in the Tarahumaran culture. Padre Luis Verplancken, who has worked in the region since 1952, was adamant that the Social Trust must support action that the Tarahumarans want.

"The individuals we brought here have experience working with people on their own terms," said Gary Cunningham, associate dean and director of NMSU's Agricultural Experiment Station.

Visits to nearby fields show that the Tarahumara are good farmers, given water. But as the governor of Norogachi said, "We work and work and get nowhere."

Water for drinking, water for irrigation, and water to support fish were at the forefront of Tarahumaran concerns. One elder accused intruders of taking the water, while his people had to move their homesteads to find the precious commodity.

Working group committees mulled the riddle of appropriate technology for the region, knowing that the simple, straight-forward solutions that occurred to us had most likely been tried and failed before now. While we argued in meeting rooms, a cow was slaughtered in the center of the compound to prepare for an all-night feast.

The compound yard began to fill with wood for fires and caldrons. Women sat and started preparing food, while elders began rituals and dances. Tirelessly pacing men and women, some with babies strapped to their backs, became part of the blessing. The swirling moves of men in long, bright robes before expressionless men playing fiddles were repeated again and again, broken only by a collective whoop. Hats fashioned of mirrors caught the setting sun's light. The pacing, dancing, and whooping continued throughout the night, as did the drinking of corn liquor.

We left them at dawn, drove out of the hold of the canyons and flew home, arriving in Las Cruces before dark. In the span of a few hours, we had traveled 600 miles in two nations. We switched from dirt roads to airplanes and from an outpost in an ancient society to NMSU's contemporary campus. The gap between the minds of us outsiders and those of the Tarahumara could not be bridged so easily. The NMSU faculty, in a small way, began the journey.