We are back with our series, Peace Corps Journals to hear about our current and past volunteers who have served close to Mayu’s artisans in Peru.  Madeline Wu shares here experience with weavers. For more on Peru and artisans, subscribe to our RSS feeds, follow us on Twitter and find us on Facebook.

Every week, I find my way to the caserio where my artesans live.  One of my small business projects involves an artesan association.  The artesans weave beautiful cloth that they use in their daily lives.  I walk about an hour to reach my artesans, who live in the rural part of El Faique.  Even with a small pueblo like El Faique, the townsfolk
tend to be the richer, better educated folks.  The farmers live on the
outskirts of town or further.  Rumor has it that the furthest caserio
from El Faique is a two-day walk or an 8-hour motorcycle ride.

The walk itself is rather beautiful.  I pass through the most
commercial part of town with the hustle and bustle of goods being
carried in and out of stores, with the sputtering of motorcycles
zipping along the paved road, with the townsfolks sitting on benches
outside, people watching.  I know a miniscule percentage of the town,
except somehow the little grade school children remember my name.
“Hola, Señorita Maddi!” follows me all the way through the end of the
paved road.  After I pass through El Faique proper, I enter into
various caserios that line the road — Pampa Alegre, Huando Bajo, San
Cristobal and on.  The dirt road is flanked by adobe houses and tin
roofs, hens and their little chicks running around and the occasional
swine rolling in the dust.  More often than not, people are sitting
outside, enjoying the day.  On the weekends, I’ll walk to my artesans
to spend time with them in their homes.  The artesans are women who
live in the rural parts of El Faique.  While my work in small business
takes place during our weekly meetings, I find myself wanting to know
more about their daily lives.

There was a period where my artesans weren’t meeting because of the
coffee harvest.  The farmers start early before sunrise, rubbing oil
on their palms and sliding the hands down the tree branches, loosening
the red and green coffee beans from the trees into their palms.  The
harvest lasts about three months long.  There is a large presence of
NGOs in this area that drives the schedule of the farmers.  This
particular NGO brings together the farmers to protect the interests of
coffee farmers in our region. After the farmers harvest the coffee,
the coffee is sold to the NGO, who in turn finds international markets
for the organic, fair trade coffee.  For my own knowledge, I am
interested in learning more on the process of coffee tree to coffee
sales in the States occur.

This particular Saturday, I made it to San Cristobal in search of one
the artesans.  She and her husband were in the midst of a plumbing
problem.  Since they live away from the city, the plumbing is rather
piecemeal.  The water runs dirty most of the time with its source from
the local ravine.  Eventually, we sat in her adobe house, scooping out
the fleshy parts of a pumpkin for a dessert.  In the kitchen, I
learned about her family.  Her husband, a coffee farmer, her daughter,
and her 12 year old grand daughter all live under one roof.  The
conversation ran the usual course — “where are you from?  are you
really american?  are you single?  do you have kids?  what is your
work?  what is your profession?”  After a few hours, I asked to use
the bathroom.  All of the women in the house exchanged glances at my
question, and then sent the grand daughter to lead me to the bathroom.
We walked out of the house and away from the other houses to the
meeting place for the coffee association.  Right next to the building,
we pried open a gate made of dried sugarcane husks where she
eventually led me to an outhouse.

That was when I understood the exchange of glances — bathrooms with
ceramic toilets, tiles and caulking, matching colors, lighting and
floor mats are luxurious.  Even in my current living situation, we are
better off than most of my town.  We have a toilet and indoor
plumbing.  Most of the folks go outside in the field.  The outhouse
that I ended up using was probably an effort by some NGO to help with
improving the lives of farmers.  I was surprised, though worse was
that I didn’t think about the cost of basic necessities.  Or rather, I
didn’t think that even “basic necessities” are relative.  Some of my
assumptions come from massive generalizations that are made about
poverty from university classes and then also from my own middle-class
American life.

Tags: Artesans, handmade, Mayu, Peace Corps, Peru, Weaving

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 27th, 2010 at 10:18 am and is filed under Peace Corps Journals, Peru. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.