Central Peruvian Quechua Women and Multi-tasking

Life for the women of South Conchucos Valley, north-central Andes of Peru, is much like that of my North American great-grandfather when he first came from Norway. A woman’s hands are never idle: Either she has a baby, a load to carry, or her hands are busy on a spindle, busily twisting wool strands into yarn as soon as she steps outside her door.

She will often walk an hour or more each way to go to the weekly market to buy the essentials and sell whatever she has from her garden or home. Her manta that will carry back her purchases also makes for good shading during a well-deserved rest along the way.

Children are a blessing in the eyes the Quechua. The family will spend money they don’t have (i.e. loans), to provide for the many special occasions in the child’s life. Parents want their children, especially boys, to go to school, learn Spanish and be literate, so they can get good jobs and a good lifestyle. But they also want them to maintain their family ties, traditions and age-old ways of the Quechua life. Children are included in everything and go along wherever Mom is going.

The traditional Quechua house in this valley is packed-mud walls (tapyal) with a fire-baked tile roof. Houses are nearly always two stories with a long covered open room or balcony upstairs which shades the patio and provides space to dry grains and tubers. The second story is also for storage of corn, straw, squash, as well as for laundry lines. The bottom floor is used for bedrooms and storage. A separate, one room (8 x 10) kitchen often has well-blackened walls from the smoke of many a eucalyptus cooking fire. 

 Aside from household duties, women help in the tasks of planting and harvesting. Meals are prepared for all the labourers and taken to the field at noon or, if the house is close, the workers pack into the patio area and are fed. The grain is cut, threshed, cleaned and carefully stored as the family food source until next harvest. Only a few of the farmers with larger fields can afford to sell their produce to the nearby town or to commercial trucks who come up at harvest time to take grain down to the coastal city of Lima. One of the ladies from the extended family, together with her children take the sheep, goats, and pigs out to pasture every morning. Often it means walking a long way up to find suitable grass on the higher plateaus

 Life is never so busy that there isn’t time for a visit as they all share the work or enjoy the festivals twice a year. However it leaves little time for reading and writing! During the 1990s most girls had quit school after a few years to help with the household chores or to care for the younger children.