saturday

Local Knowledge and Gender Issues: A Day at Home in Peru

Elettra Baldi , `15

Saturday was a day for our families. Rachel and I got to spend a day with mom, Hilda and our baby brother Yamil. She took us hiking up to her mother’s house. The hike gave us an opportunity to speak to her in more depth than we had in the past. Rachel and I had been hesitant before then to talk to her and ask questions about her lifestyle. Hilda took us on many different stops to have us learn about her family and her life. We left the house, and started of at the fields that lay right above out house and learned that she works with trigo (wheat) this is her main job after the commitment of nursing 3 children. We then continued up to where we saw her horse and cows which she was so proud of. We had the horse come up with us on the hike and she told us all about how she takes care of him and how they are cheap to buy here compared to the United States.  Our next stop was the most mystical, we arrived to Inca ruins where we explored and learned about this tunnel that reaches from Piscacucho all the way to Cusco. This tunnel, created by the Incas, had just been closed down about 5 years ago because people would go in without knowing how dangerous and how long the walk would become. Next to the ruins rested a field of strawberries so we sat and talked while she showed us other edible plants such as, this this plant they call limón that taste like a lemon but looks like pine needles. A this showed us local knowledge that we would only experience here. Upon leaving that we walked up to the last stop, her mother’s house, her house was secluded up in the mountains.  There we learned that our mother has a sister who is 14 like our mothers oldest son. The difference is that this young girl is getting ready to have children in the next year or two. This made me think that the girls here drop out of secondary school to have children. This did not surprise me because, yesterday we talked to a women about women’s rights and she explained who she too dropped out of school to have children and that the average age of having children is 15-18.

In conversing during the hike Rachel and I got to strengthen our relationship with our mother.  We learned about her and she learned about us.  I remember briefly mentioning that my favorite food was pasta, and even though it is not common to find pasta here, I was surprised to eat spaghetti for dinner. Lastly our mom had always called us chicas but that day she called us by our names,