Biography
Rómulo Sauñe was a Quechua Christian leader of Peru who gave his life to the translation and teaching of the Bible among his own people. He was born in the Andean highlands, in a poor Quechua-speaking family, in the middle of the twentieth century. He grew up in a region marked by poverty and by the neglect of the Indian peoples. He came to know Christ through the work of evangelical believers in the mountains. He felt a call to serve his people with the Word of God.
He was trained as a teacher and a linguist, and he worked with the Peruvian Bible Society and with others to bring the Scriptures into the Quechua language. He took part in the revision of the Quechua Bible and in the training of pastors. He had a gift for languages and for explaining the Scriptures in a way that his people could understand. He spoke across Peru and in other countries on the needs of the Indian church. He was a man of gentleness and of strong faith, who held the respect of both the missionaries and the Indian believers.
He lived during the years of the Shining Path insurgency, when the Maoist guerrillas brought terror to the highlands of Peru. Thousands of villagers were killed, among them many Christian leaders, who were seen as enemies of the revolution. He was a leader of the evangelical churches in the Ayacucho region, which was the heart of the conflict. He refused to leave his people. It is reported that he was killed by the guerrillas in the early 1990s.