Artisanal anecdotes

During our visit to Fredy’s workshop in dust-choked Ate, he tells us of growing up in the jungle and coming to Lima at age 13. He takes us up to his roof, where he and his wife are slowly building their living space, room by room. I look out at the dust, hovering above the valley and making everything brown, the bleak mountains in the distance, the other buildings with rebar sticking every which way. I think what a gorgeous place he had to leave in the jungle and what he has here, now. As I’m getting increasingly depressed, Fredy gestures out to the same view I’ve been contemplating. “Look at this,” he says. “It’s so beautiful.”

I ask one ceramicist whether he thought his 7-year-old daughter would follow in his footsteps. “I think parents always want their kids to be interested in what they do, but they also want them to be happy and have a better life. We work every day, from around 6:30 in the morning until 10 or 11 at night. We work Saturdays, Sundays, holidays. I don’t want my daughter to work like that.”

Alvina is on her fourth visit to Manos Amigas, attempting to deliver a jewelry order. Each time, Christina carefully checks over each piece and soon has a pile of jewelry that Alvina will need to correct and bring back yet again. After she leaves, Christina, exasperated, says, “She has glasses! She needs to wear them! She is just too ashamed of them, so she doesn’t even see the scratches I’m pointing out to her! Maybe she would learn to wear them after I keep rejecting the order!” On her next visit, Christina asks Alvina to wear her glasses while they review her order together. It works.

At Jacinto’s workshop, I have to use the bathroom. Sam, who had visited the facilities at another artisan’s home earlier, whispers, “It will just be a hole in the ground; be prepared.” I ask Jacinto’s wife where los servicios are. She exchanges a worried look with her adult daughter, but walks me out of the workshop, out to the back of their home. She moves a couple of tubs of clothes soaking in laundry water, and points up the sand hill: Just up there.

I trudge up the hill and see a toilet set directly into the sand with reed mats encircling it for a measure of privacy. I move the mat serving as a door and turn around. The deep blue ocean, sunlit and sparkling on this strangely sunny and clear winter day, is what I see when I look out over rows and rows of homes just like Jacinto’s, shacks without running water, with reeds mats as roofs. The calm, beautiful sea is such a contrast to the difficult life they lead.

Silvia hands me a pair of earrings as a goodbye gift. “I am so sorry that these are not fair trade, but I wanted to give you something,” she said. I look at the sticker on the velvety bag and read that it is from Creaciones Ymelda. This happens to be from Ymelda Diaz, the one artisan who works with Manos Amigas AND has her own puesto in Inca Market. There are literally a couple thousand of these puestos in different mercados lining the same street in Miraflores, and Silvia just happened to go to the one tiny puesto that could be called (but is not advertised as) fair trade. Fate? Chance? Luck? We are both delighted by the coincidence.

While Ymelda lives in Ventanilla and has her ceramic workshop there, she sells a variety of merchandise at her puesto in Miraflores. She works in her taller producing windchimes in the morning, then makes the two-and-a-half hour trip to Miraflores on “2-3 buses, depending which ones come first,” to get to Inca Market to sell in all afternoon and evening. Her dream is to own a car.

We visited Daniel Novoa’s workshop twice, once in November and again in March. (You can see pictures of Daniel in my post about the November visit with Yannina and one of her Italian clients as well as in my dad’s post about my parents’ trip to Peru.) He is young - just turned 33 last month - and is incredibly entrepreneurial. He took a class on starting your own business, wrote a business plan, and learned how to create and maintain a web presence. His first child was born in May. In July, orders were slow so he was working in construction. A friend asked to use his kiln to fire several pieces, not an unusual request. His girlfriend called him several hours later in a panic. Their friend had left something flammable on top of the kiln, which caught on fire and burned his entire workshop down.

Yannina found out several weeks later, when Daniel, ever the entrepreneur, called to ask if she’d buy a ticket to a dinner he and his girlfriend were holding to raise money to rebuild the workshop. After seeing the damage firsthand, Yannina is currently working on securing a bigger loan for Daniel through several client donations.

A large percentage of the artisans want to handle exporting themselves but very few appear to have the capacity to navigate the complexities of international commerce and shipping, let alone the business acumen to market their products and manage client relationships.

Some of Manos Amigas’ artisans brought their products in well before the due date, or right on time, with few or minor corrections needed. But more often Manos Amigas was left hanging until the last minute, wondering whether artisans would bring their orders in on time (and then, when they had not been delivered, Yannina would spend days calling and attempting to reach artisans who were suddenly not answering her phone calls). And often, when an order arrived and Manos Amigas did quality control by inspecting each item, they would find product imperfections (where several products might need to be redone or touched up) or design errors (where the whole order would need to be fixed or redone completely). 

We saw this happen so consistently, with a lot of stress on Manos Amigas’ end regarding getting the products to their client on time that Sam and I privately thought physically checking on the order’s status during the production process would be beneficial. Another organization which we respect checks four times on their artisans’ progress and accordingly have fewer surprises. Manos Amigas isn’t staffed for that, though, and they aren’t really set up to work with volunteers. And realistically, visiting the artisans could easily be a full time job. We were exhausted by the travel and pollution with doing an average of one day of visits per week; imagine the exhaustion daily visits would produce.

Zenaida is so outrageously late with an order that Yannina, normally patient in the face of insanity, loses her patience. Zenaida swears she’ll have the order in on Monday the 13th, several months late and after a dozen similar promises. “Monday the 13th?” Yannina asks. “Of what year?” Zenaida doesn’t show up on Monday, surprising no one.

When she does show up, not only is it six weeks after Monday the 13th, but she arrives at 10 pm. My response would have been to go to sleep and deal with the order the next day. It was months late, after all! Yannina stayed up all night, packing the order for shipment.