Incahuasi

Twice in May I traveled to Incahuasi in the mountains of northeast Lambayeque. Peace Corps is considering sending a volunteer there and asked me to check out the road conditions and the work possibilities for a potential volunteer. I went with a group from CITE Sipán, a governmental organization providing training to the artisans of Incahuasi.

To travel to Incahuasi is, as they say on Discovery Channel, to take a step backward in time, perhaps several steps backward. The women still dress like this:

 

In order to sell a centro de mesa (what we call a table runner) for 80 soles (30 dollars), the artisans:

1) Raise 3 to 6 sheep each.

2) Shear the sheep.

3) Clean and wash the wool.

4) Spin yarn from the wool.

5) Collect plants and bark and prepare dyes.

6) Dye the yarn or wool.

7) Weave the centro de mesa on a strap loom.

I bought this centro de mesa for 60 soles (24 bucks):

 

Incahuasi, at 9,000 feet above sea level, presents some difficult logistical challenges to those who wish to visit. It takes four hours on dirt roads to reach Incahuasi from Chiclayo, the capital of Lambayeque (I live about 15 minutes from Chiclayo, in Callanca). In the rainy season, November to April, the roads are muddy, slippery, rutted, flooded and on a bad day entirely washed away. Still, they used to be much worse. A recent construction project cut two hours off the travel time from Chiclayo.

Incahuasi (House of the Inca) is exactly the kind of place that an American would think of when imagining the life of a Peace Corps volunteer. The residents speak Quechua, a thousand-year-old language derived from the language of the Incas. The majority also speak Spanish but when talking among themselves they invariably speak Quechua. Until recently there was no telephone service. Goods brought in by truck are expensive so people generally grow their own yucca, raise their own chickens, goats, sheep, turkeys and ducks, milk their own livestock, and in general don’t have a lot of use for money.

 

As you can tell by the way the women dress, covered from head to foot in layers of garments like Middle Eastern women in their burkas, Incahuasi is an extremely macho place. The women do the majority of the work, tending the family’s animals, growing the family’s corn and yucca, raising an average of six children per family.

 

When they aren’t doing any of the above, they’re spinning yarn. The women always carry a bundle of wool and a spindle with them wherever they go. While they converse with you, while they walk up and down the street, while they suckle their infants or while they listen to a trainer describe a weaving technique, they’re busy spinning, spinning, spinning the yarn. It’s said quite accurately that the hands of the women of Incahuasi never stop working.

The women maintain haunting and lyrical beliefs concerning their flocks of sheep, the wool derived from the animals, the process of spinning yarn and the weaving of the bags, ponchos, blankets and skirts that they sell or produce for their own families. They believe that the wool grows in conjunction with the cycles of the moon; that is, as the moon changes from a new moon to a quarter-, half- and full moon, the wool, too, increases in volume in harmony with the waxing moon. They liken the spinning of yarn to the growth of a fetus in a mother’s womb since a skein of yarn begins small and thin but gradually enlarges to form a ball that fills the spindle. They compare the preparation of the loom, the placement of the vertical strands of the warp, to the final stages of growth of the fetus and its birth. As they position the strands they tie and cut the strands of the warp as one ties and cuts the umbilical cord. The completed network of vertical strands is like the blanket in which one wraps a newborn child.

The process of weaving is equivalent to the raising of the child—laborious, difficult, time-consuming, back-breaking, requiring much love and great care so that the surface remains smooth and the edges clean and without distortions. When a woven article of clothing or decoration grows old, the women say that it’s a “grandmother.” When it finally reaches a state where it can no longer be used, they dig a hole and bury it as if its remains were human remains.

 

Such analogies suggest why the women of Incahuasi are willing to invest maybe 100 hours in the production of a poncho that they’ll sell for 120 soles. First of all they view their investment as zero and in a way they’re correct. Sheep eat grass, grass costs nothing. Shearing the sheep costs nothing beyond the initial cost of shears (and sometimes they use a piece of broken glass instead). Spinning yarn costs nothing. Dying the yarn costs nothing since plants and bark are free. Weaving costs nothing since the wood for the loom comes from trees that grow on the mountainside. Of the factors we’d consider in determining cost, that leaves only the value of their work. But the women don’t consider their work as having a monetary value any more than a mother would view the work of raising her child as billable time. Work is like breathing to these women. The concept of charging for a breath or a heartbeat seems ridiculous to us, the concept of charging for work—something that’s nearly as automatic to them as breathing is to us—sounds equally ridiculous to a woman from Incahuasi. To an Incahuasina work is the default mode, the natural state of a human being in that human being’s every waking moment. A mother doesn’t say, “I wonder how I could streamline my work flow so as to produce a child of acceptable quality—competitive in the marketplace—with a minimum investment in time and materials?” The women of Incahuasi think of the blanket they’re weaving as a living being; naturally they’re going to go to any length necessary to make that blanket the best blanket possible. A mother does whatever it takes and doesn’t complain about the lousy pay.

There’s an enigmatic Bible verse that beseeches the Christian to do the seemingly impossible, to “never cease to pray.” It’s easier to understand the signficance of that injunction when one watches the hands of a woman of Incahuasi, which never cease to work.