My broken heart

When I went out this last week to another community to dye wool, I was expecting somewhat of the same experience that I had with the first group of women in Lanco. I was anticipating a bit of a difference because Lanco is a small Chilean town, while the community we went to on Wednesday was a Mapuche community on one of their reservations. Needless to say, I was not prepared for what I saw there. This was not a jolly group of women all coming together for the communal experience of dyeing wool. This was a group of women who were coming together for the sake of their livelihood. In Lanco, the selling of wool, clothing, and weavings is more of a supplemental income they can bring home. Those women are married to working husbands and their involvement in the weaving project is a good way for them to ensure that their head stay above water. For the women in the Mapuche community of Repocura, this is their only source of income. Many of them are married, but their husbands aren’t working. These men can only get jobs as day laborers for construction companies, but with the global economic crisis, nothing is being built and there is no work for these men to do. It is now up to the women and their wool to bring money home. Unfortunately, with the state of the economy, their merchandise isn’t selling. These women live in conditions I have only read about. Most of them speak mainly Mapudungun and little to no Spanish. They live with the rats and the fleas, no electricity, and no access to clean water. Everyday they have to walk to a well to get water. In the summer time however, the well dries up and they have to get their water from the river. All of their washing and bathing is also done in the river.

This specific community has been the subject of numerous sociological case studies due to their inability to work together as a group. The women in this community fight, bicker, and back-stab each other constantly. Large missions organizations, like World Vision, have tried to help these people, only to ditch them when their efforts failed due to the women’s inability to get along with each other. My aunt and her mission came in as sort of a last hope for these women. She introduced them to the weaving project and before long they were fighting amongst themselves and trying to get each other kicked out of the weaving groups. One woman even bought another woman’s weaving, turned it in to my aunt as her own, and had it sold it in the states for twice what she bought it for. When all this started, my aunt had them all over to her house for dinner, sat them all down at the table, and had a little come to Jesus meeting. She explained to them that their bickering had driven off major organizations and she was the last chance they had to receive help from anyone. Basically, they had to learn to resolve their issues and keep their personal lives outside the weaving group or they would have no chance to succeed. Giving them the option to change for themselves and empowering them to solve their own issues without trying to solve the problems for them, enabled these women to rise up and form one of the most successful weaving groups.

Barb considers one of these women, Elcira, as one of the greatest successes from the weaving project. Elcira was orphaned at the age of 2 when her mother died. She was "raised", and I use the word loosely, by her older sister. By the time she was 14, she was already pregnant and living on her own. Barb suspects that this pregnancy did not come about from any relationship with a boyfriend. She lived with her son in a tin room in the country. At times, she was forced to go out in a field, pick grass, boil it, and feed the water to her son just to avoid starvation. She did survive, her son grew up, got married, and now she lives on the same property as her son, his wife, and their young daughter. She got involved in the weaving project and turned out to be, what Barb determines, an expert weaver. Of the 30 plus women involved in the project, there are only about 4 who would be deemed expert weavers. These women truly are artists while the rest of the work would be considered to be more artisan weavings. Elcira, is an artist. Her weavings sell immediately in the states for $100-$150. From the sales, she has been able to build herself a house, which is actually just a bigger room made of wood instead of tin, and use her old room as a workshop. She now has electricity and is awaiting the sale of more weavings in order to finally get water and glass windows put in. At the moment, the windows are just covered in plastic and she still has to walk to a well for water and bathe in the river.

These women are depending on this project for their livelihood and it broke my heart to see them so disheartened because they aren’t making any sales. People in the states are disappointed that they can’t afford as extravagant of a vacation this year because of the economy, when these women are wondering how they will feed themselves and their children if no one is buying their merchandise.