Nilma's Interview

Last Thursday morning Lauren and I spent the morning wandering around Juliaca, list of adresses in hand, finding PRISMA clients to interview for Kiva stories (see Kiva.org!). We had gotten names and adresses for various clientes from Luz, one of the loan officers and basically knocked on doors, introduced ourselves, and did interviews.
We ended up in Manco Capac, a working neighborhood named after the legendary founder of the Inca Empire, son of the Sun God and the Mother Earth (Pachamama) who rose out of Lake Titicaca, just an hour from Juliaca, to search out a place to found thier empire. That place ended up being in Cusco, a good 8 or 9 hours from the harsh winds and dust storms of Juliaca in the fertile Sacrad Valley. Now however, as one Puneño said, the Sacrad Valley inhabitants are all of Spanish decent and the only “pure incans” are relegated to the altitudes of Puno and Juliaca. Thus many neighborhoods, streets, landmarks and even people or businesses are named in Quechua or after famous indigenous heroes.
As we walked through Manco Capac we saw work proceeding in every doorway and on the wide, dusty streets in this working class neighborhood. Welders welding what appeared to be evolving into a set of fire-escape stairs, carpenters sawing and drilling, women preparing street food or cleaning their stalls that they had sold late-night street food from the night before, ojotos (rubber sandals) being made out of old tires. The sounds of work were augmented by the children playing in the street (often wearing ojotos) and acianos gossiping or watching from a step while chewing coca, peeling or cutting various roots of vegetables, and or knitting.
Our first interview was on Pasaje los Zorritos, or Little Foxes Pass. We turned from the wide, rocky avenue into a smaller, still rocky street and came to the number. The metal doors were partially open revealing a carpentry shop indside with two men at work. We knocked anyway and introduced ourselves, asking for our client, Nilma.
She emerged from a back room with a baby in her manta and invited us into her home. We passed through the carpentery shop, an 6 by 15 courtyard filled with stacks of lumber, partially completed shelves, and a few tools and entered into a small room made of mud bricks. We sat down across from Nilma in one of her two rooms, a narrow space with a table and stove top at one end and a bench on either side and began our interview.
Nilma had begun as a buyer and seller of “ropa americana” or American-style clothing. She brought it fromDesaguadero, on the southern border of Peru, close to Bolivia and sold to stores or stalls in Juliaca. Then, about 15 years ago she met her husband, a carpenter, and the two of them started an independent carpentry shop. However, during a difficult period about 10 years ago her husband went to the gold mines of Ananeya where he forgot his wife (and two children), leaving her sola to provide for and raise a family. She took over the carpentry shop, which she runs to this day. Some years later when her husband returned they reunited and he now works with her in the shop. She says, however, that she takes care of all of the finances because “unfortunately he has had some errors.” Now they sometimes employ another employee, often one of her 16 younger siblings or a boy from the neighborhood. She hopes to one day be able to buy power tools (a sander and a saw) and eventually be able to employ a full time helper.
Sitting in her room I asked if she had bought a TV in the time since she´d taken out a loan with PRISMA. TVs are often one of the first applainces women buy when their finances improve even minimally, telenovelas are extremely popular here, you can see “Gitanas” or “Asi es la Vida” playing even in artesania stalls on the shores of Lake Titicaca. Telenovelas have sometimes been called the opiate of the poor women and here that may be true. Nilma however responded “No, I don´t have money for a television yet. I just got electricity, la señorita Luz (a PRISMA loan officer) helped me with that. Now I´m saving up for a place to live with my children (she now has six). Once we have a nicer house we can get appliances like that. But right now, a television doesn´t help me pay my loan. It wont bring me any money, it will just waste my time.”
Later in the interview we asked about the stack of cigar boxes dividing her small home into two rooms. “Oh, I sell those on the side, along with my used clothing business. When we have enough money for an electric sander we will be able to live off of only our carpentry business. Until then selling used clothing and cigars helps us pay for things when we don´t have a lot of orders.¨
Many, maybe the majority of women we have talked to have multiple businesses to keep them alive year round. Nilma says when orders are low her husband goes off to look for work in other parts of the state, anything from mining to trash collection. Even our host family in Puno has had multiple businesses. In the early 90´s they bought shrimp in Arequipa, my host mother Carmen´s birth city, and brought them by bus to Puno where they sold them to touristic restaurants. Later Carmen opened a polleria and a restaurant operating from their house and in the summers taught dance classes to neighborhood children. When I asked her why she did all this when she and her husband have full time jobs she said, ¨We didn´t have enough money. First we had to feed Annie, and then after we got our own house we needed money to put up curtains and buy furniture.¨ Now Carmen, who also works as a schoolteacher, has a store in her house because, in her words, she doesn´t want to ¨always have to be asking Darwin for money.¨
Anyway, as we finished interviewing Nilma she asked where we were going next. We told her the woman´s name, and she knew the woman and insisted on walking us over to her house. This was certainly one of my favorite interviews so far but Nilma´s story seems anything but unusual among her compañeras in PRISMA and in Juliaca. It seemed plausible that in every house in that neighborhood, and many other neighborhoods in Juliaca, there were woman working just like Nilma with similar goals and histories, and with equally well-used loans.

Jessie