A glimpse behind the scenes

The project that will keep us busy until the end of July is writing and editing stories of Manos Amigas’ artisans and taking photos which help tell those stories. Sam will post some of these stories and photos to his blog; while I will probably link to them occasionally, I suspect that my stories here will be limited to the adventure of finding and writing those stories, like being on (and off!) the edge of the map.


I’ve been working on this project for several months now, but we only just started making visits to the artisans ourselves in February. While I knew the goal was to write stories for nearly all of the artisans, we also knew that a bunch of information existed already based on our explorations of the computer network. I didn’t want to have to replicate work, and figured that some of the existing stories might just need some accompanying photos, for instance. With Christina’s help, I found all the current information from all the various computers and slowly started reading through them to see what information existed on what artisan. And, oh joyous rapture, I built a spreadsheet to keep track of it all. How I love a clean, chock-full-o’-miscellaneous-info, excel spreadsheet. I was recording which artisans already had a story written, whether it was good enough to use as is or with a few edits, or whether it needed more information to be interesting, which artisan workshops were documented with good photographs, etc.


Finally, I could cross-reference my spreadsheet with a list Yannina had given me for which artisans to visit. I determined that about 10 of the 50-odd artisans did not need a visit at all, due to the quality of information already in Manos Amigas’ possession. This was a relief since, while we are excited by these visits for a number of reasons, I really don’t want to ride a bus for two hours there, visit a workshop for an hour or two, then take a bus back for two hours, if we don’t genuinely need to visit. I think Simon and Sam feel the same way!


Most of the artisan workshops we visit are at least one hour away by public bus. Most are probably closer to one and a half to two hours, one way. So these aren’t spontaneous visits. We figure out what artisans are next on our list and review what type of documentation we need to collect. We tend to see 2 or 3 workshops in a day, depending on how close they are to one another and how much information we need. I interview the artisan and scribble notes, never getting down as much information as I want to because of my mind's constant mixture of Spanish and English. Sam takes photographs and asks questions. While we tag team on holding Simon or watching him carefully in the workshops, Sam usually takes care of him more often, since I have to ask questions/listen/write, etc. Simon's limit tends to be two workshop visits, although I am always pushing the envelope.


While we have visited workshops in several different districts so far, I'm limiting this post to the workshops in San Juan de Lurigancho: three jewelry workshops, two painted glass workshops, and one painted wood workshop. The levels of success have varied intensely. 


Fermín and Carlos are incredible silversmiths (each has his own workshop; they are colleagues but not business partners) and each has a comfortable home and workshop. They have both been in the business for 25 years and have a small handful of clients, therefore not dependent on any one client for most of their business. That said, they are both always looking for more opportunities for clients and to grow and expand. One of Carlos' clients is Novica, and he showed us his work on their website. Fermín is interested in starting a jewelry school for poor people in his workshop, in the space where his current living quarters are, so that he and his wife could teach their craft to others who do not have a specialized skill yet. Sam recently posted about Fermín and included the story we wrote, as well as a lot of pictures; hence Fermín will not be as represented here in pictures as the other artisans.

Piles of beads being made into earrings at Fermin's workshop

Carlos' instructions for a design for a new pendant

Carlos gave us a demonstration of how he works with silver. First pieces of silver are melted under intense heat from a blowtorch.

After melting, Carlos pours the silver into a mold,  then puts it in water to cool. He chips away any impurities that remain. The small block of silver just underneath Carlos' hand is thick right now...

...but after putting the block of silver through this compressor several times, it begins to thin out.

After a dozen or so passes through the compressor, the small block of silver was stretched into this thin band. Carlos can now use this to cut out different shapes to create earrings, rings, etc.

One of Carlos' workers heats a ring with a blowtorch while carefully placing the base on top. The base will later be filled with a stone.

Simon wasn't sure if he wanted to play with Carlos' dog or not, but they kept tabs on each other the whole visit.

Alvina also creates jewelry, but has a small workshop and has to outsource the silver melting/pressing that Fermín and Carlos can easily do in their workshops. Manos Amigas is her only client right now and while she has been able to support herself and her two sons, now in their early twenties, with jewelry making, she is mulling over other options. Alvina created the beautiful earrings we helped package for a recent shipment.

Alvina with a wall of jewelry designs and past orders

Apolonio and Jaime (again, two separate workshops) both create painted glass pieces, from trays to jewelry boxes to mirrors. I am particularly in love with Apolonio’s work. While neither employs people outside of his family, Apolonio is clearly more successful than Jaime. Apolonio seems to have a better time fulfilling his orders on time and well, and his love for his work was evident as we talked with him. Apolonio rents out two homes as an additional source of income, and is able to support himself on his artesanía as well as his rental income. Apolonio’s roof, however, still looked like it was going to collapse while we were there.

The base for one of the glass trays; it just needs to be placed into the wooden frame

The rear of Apolonio's workshop

One of the mirror frames he creates...

...several of his trays...

... and another tray, with Sam.

This brown building in the middle is Apolonio's home. His workshop is behind the sign at the top.

Jaime enjoys his work, too, but it doesn’t seem like he has the same level of business sophistication that the more successful artisans do. Jaime is considering quitting artesanía and opening a restaurant instead. His workshop is literally carved out of the rock in the hill.

Jaime's home

Jaime showed us several steps that go into making painted glass trays. The design is screened onto a piece of glass.

His son creates color separations on his computer, which Jaime then uses to paint on each color.

More color separations; there is a lot of detail in each tray!

After each color of paint is placed, they lay the glass pieces out on this long table, in the front room of their house, to dry. You can see the workshop through the open door in the back.

This is what the tray looks like when it is finished.

The workshop, carved out of rock

This is where Jaime does all the carpentry work for building the wooden trays. It is a tiny space, up these steps. It is perhaps four feet deep by 10 feet wide.

Jaime and his family

Lastenia and her siblings paint ceramics for plates and bowls, and wood for jewelry boxes and other knickknacks. They have been working together for 30 years. They live on the very very edge of a settlement at the top of San Juan de Lurigancho. They started building their home/workshop 30 years ago, but it looks like it was just started last year. It still lacks a roof, walls in some places. The existing walls are brick and mortar.

Oscar paints details on a platter

Lastenia, Oscar, and Flormira

Placemats in process

In Lastenia's workshop... note that there is no wall at the end.

Lastenia is feeling the economic downturn keenly, responding to calls from the municipal government every time they put a call out for workers. I asked her what type of work that meant. “You knock on people’s doors and deliver messages about bills being due, that sort of thing. They pay you 30 cents for every message you successfully deliver. That means you have to run around to actually make enough money every day!” Lastenia is not young. 

It is incredibly meaningful to see the artisans in their homes, in their environs, and seeing them produce items which look familiar from my shopping excursions to Global Gifts. It is also quite humbling. Seeing the beauty that can be produced from a district where “beauty” is not the first word that comes to mind, is striking.

At the edge of the map, and beyond

Lima is a giant city. Official population estimates say that Lima is about 8 million people strong. However, there are millions of people who are not counted because they live in shantytowns on the outskirts of town or are part of what are called land invasions here: a planned takeover of a hill or mountainside or sand dune or otherwise undesirable piece of land, by a group of people who are desperate to call the government’s attention to them and demand that they include them in city planning by providing them with water, pipes, electricity. This doesn’t happen overnight, of course; being included in city plans might take decades. I include that here because many of the people who live in these areas are not necessarily included in these population numbers. We have heard more consistently that Lima’s population is closer to 13 or 14 million people.

Lima is also a desert, a dry, dusty desert which happens to be on the Pacific Ocean. I read somewhere that Cairo is the only other metropolis in the world that is drier than Lima. I’ve lived in the desert before, but I have never been in as dry of a place as Lima. When I lived in Tucson, there was a definite rainy spell with a predictable, fierce monsoon nearly every afternoon for several months. Here, it just doesn’t rain. Anyway, several weeks ago there was a very soft mist that fell overnight, and it wreaked havoc. It was big news, there were floods and damage and leaks. One of the artisans told us it hadn’t rained like that for 10 years. I hadn’t realized that was rain. But then again, in a location where nothing falls from the clouds, I suppose that was a hard rain.


And Lima is spread out. It covers 43 different districts, is about the size of Rhode Island, and takes lots and lots of time to cross, regardless of whether you are in a car or a bus.


I find a lot of solace in being able to find our location on my gigantic, extremely detailed Lima street map, even if it seems slightly useless at times. It includes most of the streets for 30 of the 43 districts, the ones that make up the metropolitan area. (The remaining 13 are rural, desert, or mountainous.) Street names change with each district, so being on 28 de Julio in Miraflores does not in any way guarantee that you will get to 28 de Julio in Lima centro. And then half the time the official name of a street (like Garcilaso de la Vega, a main street in Lima centro, listed on maps and street signs) is not the name that Limeños use (they call it Wilson, list it on the sides of buses as a destination point, and look at you with a blank stare if you call it otherwise). I like tracing the route our bus is taking as we wind through the city, and I have also taken comfort in knowing that a taxi driver is taking me in the correct direction when I have felt a little uneasy.


When we had first talked to Yannina about doing artisan visits by ourselves, I was worried about safety. I cannot tell you how many times we’ve heard awful stories and that people have told us to always have a local with us when going to these neighborhoods. I asked her about that and she said, “The artisans will always meet you at the bus stop and then walk you to the next artisan’s workshop after you are done. When you are finished with visits for the day, the final artisan will walk you back to the bus stop and wait with you until the bus comes.” Ok, that sounds fine. And it works that way, kind of, when the artisans are within walking distance of one another. But when they are miles from one another, escorting us is impossible and expensive. So we are on our own at times.


On Tuesday, we were on a city bus in San Juan de Lurigancho, one of Lima’s poorer districts. We often take this specific city bus south, to go to Barranco and eat Mexican food or play in the city pool, or north to go to a favorite heladería or the art museum in the city center. But on Tuesday, we were taking it north, all the way to the end of the line to visit three artisan workshops.

The end of the line, high in the hills of San Juan de Lurigancho

When I called each of the artisans to set up the visits, I asked them how to get there from Manos Amigas using public transportation. Each told me a specific stop number to get off at, then to call them and that they would come get us. I was surprised to hear them cite stop numbers. It was kind of like hearing that the buses have route numbers. “Take the 10E to the 15th block of Avenida Santa Rosa. Get off at the Mercado Number 2.” What did he mean, the 10E? “The 10E, the purple and white bus that goes from Villa el Salvador to Canto Grande.” Oh, okay. I know that bus. So then I started watching the buses, trying to see where it said 10E. I’ve now seen it occasionally marked on the side of the bus but as it is not consistent or frequently used, there is zero possibility I would have ever figured out which was the 10E just by knowing the number! I asked Christina about the stop numbers; she said that here in the city there aren’t numbers on the stops, but in these neighborhoods, often built into the side of the hills and rock, there are.


The addresses in these neighborhoods are different, too; instead of having a street name and a number denoting a house, homes or businesses are listed by which manzana and lote they belong to. I would haphazard that a manzana is a block, but not a block as we would describe it (as in, “go four more blocks and it’s on your left.”). Rather, a manzana would be a block as viewed from above, including all four sides of that block, not just the one side on the street we’d happen to be on. And then the manzana is divided up into however many lotes which people have started to build their homes. So, for instance, we visited Melquiades’ workshop in Lurín several months ago, and his address is Manzana B1, Lote 08, Nuevo Lurín. Here is where my map fails me; I can’t navigate by myself based on that information. While manzanas and lotes are drawn on the map, they are simply tiny squares, with perhaps the immediate neighborhood listed. No street names, no manzana numbers.


When we got into San Juan de Lurigancho, I went up to the cobrador and asked him to let us know when we were at stop 15. After I returned to my seat, a young woman sitting behind me asked me, in English, where I was from. When I told her, she asked, somewhat concerned, “How is it that you are in San Juan de Lurigancho?” I wondered if perhaps she thought we had accidentally missed our stop way back in Lima centro. I explained that we were volunteering with a fair trade exporter and were visiting several of the artisans they work with, to take pictures and write histories. “That sounds interesting,” she said. “Just be really careful here.”


Argh! A flood of fear washed over me. I generally am nervous about a number of things with these visits: whether I have understood enough in Spanish to know what bus to take, where to get off, what to do if we can’t find the artisan or vice versa, and, of course, about our safety. While we have had zero negative encounters in other parts of the city (in fact, the only sketchy thing that has happened to us was in Miraflores), here I got immediately scared when someone on the bus cautioned us.


After we finished our visit to our first workshop, I got out my map and asked Lastenia, the artisan, where we needed to get off to see Apolonio, our next visit. “Take the bus down to the intersection of Canto Grande and San Martin. Get off, cross the street, and do not move until Apolonio comes. Stay right there. Do. Not. Move.”


Yikes, another warning. Should I panic yet?


The day was full, we ended up needing to take mototaxis three separate times to end up at the right places to meet artisans or return to a bus stop, and we encountered no safety issues. We were certainly out of place and noticeable, but perhaps we were so obviously out of place that anyone that might have wished us ill steered clear.


Lastenia had pointed to where we were on the map, the very edge of the district of San Juan de Lurigancho where beyond the mountains begin. On the map, it looks like you would fall into the abyss if you went further. It was interesting to compare that to her neighborhood, built into the side of a small mountain, steep stairs going up the hill to access other homes that were carved out of the rock. As Lima keeps growing, people will keep building up this hill. I cannot imagine how hard of a life that would be, needing to haul your water up countless steps. I would think your life would be so focused on your basic needs that you could never get ahead.


I am hopeful that our safety and luck will last through the remaining 30-odd workshops we have yet to visit, most on the outskirts of town. Our next visits are to Lurin, which is so far away it isn’t even on my gigantic map. And so we go, off into the great unknown, without our map to guide us.