On August 25th a team of 11 members from Project Peru set off to Peru to meet the people of the communities and organization with whom we hoped to build a strong relationship. Our aim was to develop trust on both ends and better understand the culture and people, which we hope to present to the World Wide Web. We underwent culture shock, altitude sickness, the discomfort of living a life without reliable amenities such as hot water, a toilet and toilet paper and we saw living conditions we had only read about or saw in pictures. We were able talk to the locals personally and see them as unique individuals that we could relate with. Everything that we experienced made these places and people very real to us. The team was in Peru for 21 days and during that time we traveled from Lima to remote regions where one can only get to by foot in the Sacred Valley. The organizations Apus Peru and Rufada guided us along our journey. The entire trip was documented through video by both Jason Rundell and Spencer Creelman as well as photographed by all 11 members. Currently, we have approximately 16 hours of video footage and 4000 pictures to work through. It is a big job, yet we are all excited to share the visit and the new developments of the project with the public.
Through this trip we gained a greater knowledge of the complex culture of weaving from the brilliantly crafted, time intensive, handmade items to the machine made cheap alternatives. We traveled through Juliaca, where machine made textiles are produced and distributed to all areas of Peru and smuggled into the near border of Bolivia. We expected to find machine made items in the big cities of Cusco, Juliaca and Puno, but we never expected to find them in the small communities, where some locals claimed them to be handmade. At first, we were easily fooled and many of us spent our Peruvian soles on these items we later considered of poor quality. As the journey went on and our understanding grew, we learned how to tell the difference. We began to see the handmade textiles as precious items embedded with tradition, labour and cultural meaning. I believe every one of us was drawn in by this incredible craft and has several pieces that they are very proud to own or excited to share with those back home. In the community of Taquile on Lake Titicaca, the ability of a man to weave a hat tight enough to hold water determines whether he is fit to be a husband. In the high altitude regions where the temperatures are very low, the locals weave a wide variety of ponchos and mantas (blankets) where many of the patterns are passed on from generation to generation. Each region in Peru has their very own unique textiles, but the one thing they all have in common is that weaving is ingrained into the culture.
Chaullacocha, Rumira Sondormayo and Chupani are the communities in the Sacred Valley that we are working with. While in Peru we went to these villages to meet the people face to face and experience living in these regions where the weather is unpredictable, the temperature is cold due to the high altitude and few crops, let alone trees grow on these steep slopes. These places were all fairy remote. Chupani itself was a three 3-hour hike, weaving through mountains. At night the temperature dropped drastically and we all had a very difficult time sleeping. We were astonished by how tough these people were from the way they handled the cold to the limited diet they ate. The women all wore skirts and most people walked around in sandals made from old tires.While in Rumira Sondormayo the women had prepared numerous different kinds of potatoes for us. We learned that Peru has over 4000 different kinds of potatoes and that they are one of the few things that these communities can grow in these harsh conditions. In Chaullacocha when the women were gathered for a weaving workshop, we even noticed that one woman had potatoes mixed in with her hand died wools. It is fair to assume that those potatoes were her food for the day. It was interesting to speak to the women and ask them questions about their lives (through Quechua translators). One thing that stood out was their selfless nature. Many of the women spoke about their hope for their children to get a good education and have a better life than them. That seemed to be a huge motivational factor in their weaving for income. While on our walk to the village we came across a woman weaving outside her home and many others were spinning while tending to their sheep. Each of us gained great respect for the local people as we were blown away by just how much the weaving tradition was a part of their daily lives, where it has lived for over two thousand years.
A representative from Apus Peru and Rufada traveled with us to these places and explained the work that they were already in the process of doing. Currently, they are running weaving workshops to help the women re-learn ancient patterns and dying techniques. Over the years they have moved away from natural materials. Income that is directly passed to the women from the sale of their weaving can be highly beneficial for the community. The women are often much more family oriented and use the money for food, schooling and other important supplies within the household. Many of the men leave to work as porters on the Inca trail because there is not much to offer in these communities. Working as porters, the men can make money to bring supplies back to their families. Unfortunately, a lot of the men drink their money away and the families receive very little. If the women can make an income from weaving, there are many beneficial outcomes. It provides another way to supplement their income, continues to maintain an ancient tradition that keeps the people in-touch with their rich ancestry and very importantly the money often goes toward the children. It was encouraging to see the pride of the people where Rufada and Apus have been facilitating developmental workshops. The locals are very proud of the improvements they have made in their weavings and were eager to show us their work. They welcomed us with smiling faces, and explained to us that they are excited and hopeful about the website we are building. We only hope it will live up to its expectations.
The eventual goal of the visit is to produce an informed and thorough website that has the ability to educate perspective clients of these textiles, that are an integrated part of these amazing cultures. The sales that are made through the website will provide financial support for programs that could bring more opportunities to the people in these remote places, burdened by very harsh living conditions that we experienced ourselves first hand. Through visiting communities where tourism has been introduced, we saw how it could both negatively and positively affect the local people. In Taquile the negative effects of tourism have been mitigated and the positives affects have been overwhelming. One great effect has been a decrease in ethnic discrimination, now these people are respected worldwide. In other regions the affects have been devastating and begging is a common practice. We realized the importance of how one needs to be sensitive to the affects of their actions and the responsibility that each one of us has in making sure that our positive intentions result in a positive outcome.
Our thorough research and the important organizations that we are working with are all part of the effort to make sure this project is successful. While we were in Cusco, Project Peru had a meeting with Apus Peru, Rufada and Nilda Caullañaupa (director of the Centre for Traditional Textiles in Cusco). Nilda grew up in a local weaving community and had the foresight to see that the women in her community had the ability to supplement their incomes through their weaving. She has been documented by National Geographic and is even mentioned in the Lonely Planet. Her organization receives funding from all over the world and she is currently working in nine different villages. Nilda was very excited about our work and gave us some great advice on how to move forward with this project. It was very inspiring to meet her. Overall our group has confirmed the confidence we were anticipating in the organizations that we are directly working with and we are excited to move forward. Currently, we are in the process of bringing all our findings together into a presentation form as well as making the finishing touches to the website. We would like to send a very sincere thank you to all those who supported Project Peru, without your generous donations this endeavor would not have been possible.
Please pay close attention for more information indicating the dates of our presentations, once the details have been sorted out!
