Rugs from Ecuador in wonderfully luminous colors
This Carpet Will Rescue A Family.
The cock is still asleep, but Luz Maria is already awake. Like every morning, she is listening in the darkness. She is lying there motionless, it is the only moment of quietness of the day. She is taking one or two breaths, then her husband José Picuasi de la Torre is shaking her arm and wants to know if it is time to get up. It is 4.30 a.m., like every day – he knows the time even without having to look at his clock. “You have to get up”, he says whereas he stays in bed to summon strength.
In the dark room Maria Luz is putting on her clothes – a white blouse with lace and embroidery, as long as a nightdress. Above it, she is wearing a white, woollen wrapover skirt and an indigo blue garment with golden trimmings. Two bands are tied around the waist to hold this masterpiece together. Finally she puts on a shawl, a headscarf, long glass bead chains for neck and wrists as well as black sandals with cactus soles. Since she was baptised at the age of six, Maria Luz (49) has been wearing the traditional costume of the indigenous people of Otavalo, which is located 74 kilometres north of the capital of Quito. It takes less than ten minutes to put on her everyday clothes. The costume is as smart as a ceremonial robe and the proud of her people who have been weaving cloth for generations.
The children must be woken up, first the five daughters who are sleeping side by side on a straw mat in the living room, then the four sons who share two rooms above the workshop which is equipped with six looms. Finally, they all show up in the courtyard, still half-asleep. In the courtyard, the meals are cooked and the toothbrushes are placed on a board next to the wash-room. Their mother has meanwhile baked small rolls. Then she combs the hair of all her children – of her oldest son Cesar (25) as well as the baby of the family, three-year-old Sarita. Her oldest daughter Maruja (30) helps her to make sure that all the children arrive at school in time. They all wear the traditional costume under the tank top of their school uniform, and they all have long black hair. The girls have tied their hair with colourful ribbons. The boys have plaited hair, and today the braids are so tight that they are whining. But today the family will welcome staff members of the child-focused organisation Plan. They come from Germany and from Quito because of the hand-woven woollen carpets.
At dawn the shapes of the two volcanoes rising up above the valley of Otavalo become visible. The volcano Taita Imabura is located directly behind the house of family Picuasi in the village of Azares, which is situated in the Andes 2,500 metres above the sea level. Opposite, Mama Cotacachi is rising up above the valley. In the stories of the indigenous people these two volcanoes are a couple. When Mama Cotacachi is covered with snow, Papa Imbabura has visited her at night. Today they are still cuddling in the clouds, but the equatorial sun is already pressing with power against the cloud cover. It is a good day to dry wool.
The family’s grandfather arrives as well. He is 73 years old and he brings large scissors. He has a knack for sheep and calls each sheep Pachito. Nobody is able to shear the sheep as properly as he does. The neighbours are aware of his skills as well, and therefore they all call him when they need wool. All of them have been weavers for generations. The grandfather learned his skills from his grandmother when he was a child. “We still produce our carpets like in former times”, he says. “Everything is done by hand, with pure wool. We dye the wool with plants from the garden, and we use ancients weaving patterns.” His knotty fingers are black because of the walnut decoction. They grab deep into Pachito’s fur and do not leave a piece of fluff. Once a week, the wool is washed at the river. All family members must help to carry it. It takes half an hour to walk deep into the valley, on narrow paths alongside small fields. Landed property is passed on to the children in equal shares. But since all the families have many children, there are hardly any fields left which are large enough to provide for a family.
“We export people”, says José, the father. Otavalo is not only well-known due to the carpets and cloths of the weavers, but also due to the high migration rate. 10,000 out of 60,000 indígenas from the high valley are abroad. Up to 400 music groups from this region are on tour all over the world. Dressed in ponchos and felt hats, they play “El Condor pasa” in pedestrian precincts, they sell money bags and CDs with panpipes music. “My friend has joined such a group. His wife died, and he did not even know it”, says the father, while standing in the cold stream. His oldest daughters have tied up their skirts and are pulling the wool in woven baskets through the water. The small children are collecting watercress at the river bank to prepare a soup for lunch. “Many people have disappeared without a trace. Are they dead, sick or in jail? Or do they feel ashamed to get in touch with their families? Their children’s distress is the saddest think I have ever seen. This is why our family decided to stick together.”
This means a great deal of work for everyone. All the family members have to work a whole week to complete one large carpet. The wool of ten sheep is needed to prepare the masterpiece measuring 240 x 190 cm. Even the fastest of the sons needs a whole day to do the weaving, from 5 a.m. until 6 p.m. It is always a race against time until dusk. The other grown-up siblings do the works that need to be done before weaving: the wool is dried in a courtyard, combed, dyed in a pot over a fire and spun again and again. It is impossible to find out the exact amount of working hours because nobody ever stops being busy.
When Luz Maria is not working at the spinning wheel, she cooks a soup, takes care of Sarita or feeds the four pigs and the numerous guinea-pigs in the pen behind the house. She carries the dung to the maize field. She works in the garden and in the small field on the slope of the mountain. She peels the corn, plucks a hen, and then she cooks a soup again because soups are a typical dish due to the cool temperatures in the highland. Then she hangs out the wool smelling of smoke so that it may dry. She also hangs out the laundry smelling of washing soap. Then the spindle is dancing and whirring again. Everything and everybody supports the family and their business. Only Rambo, the dog, is lying on the flat roof of the house and is dozing in the sun.
On the market of Otalvo, the largest place of transhipment for arts and crafts in South America, the family would have no chance to receive a fair price. This place is called “Plaza de los Ponchos”. It takes place every Saturday, and it is an El Dorado for tourists from all over the world who want to buy carpets and souvenirs at cheap prices. The goods are seldom made out of pure new wool, and they are very seldom colourfast or hand-made. The middlemen would pay 50 US dollars for the large carpet (due to the huge national debt Ecuador replaced the national currency by the dollar ten years ago).
During the last one and a half years, the family has no longer been dependent on the middlemen. Upon the request of family Picuasi, Plan pays 73 dollars for their large carpet. The income the aid organisation earns in Germany flows back into the projects in Ecuador without any deductions. These projects are very important to the family as well, e. g. the extension of health centres and educational facilities or training programmes for teachers.
José Picuasi de la Torre is the village leader of Azares. Since 2005 he has been acting as the “chief” to support the 50 families living in his village. He established a nursery school which is called “wawa wasi” in the language of his people. His baby (wawa), little Sarita, is also attending this nursery school now. The oldest daughter Maruja holds Spanish lessons for the women in the community so that they do not only speak Kichwa like her mother who was not allowed to go to school when she was a child. Cesar, the oldest son, will even study – as the first one in the family. He wants to be a primary school teacher.
There have been even more changes since family Picuasi started to produce for Plan. They have a telephone – in the village there are only eight families who have a telephone. They do not use it to call someone – this is too expensive – but to receive orders. If they receive many orders, the neighbours will help them. Moreover, all the villagers who are grazing their sheep together with the 20 sheep of family Picuasi can be sure that the grandfather will buy their wool.
The grandfather also owns two evergreen walnut trees which are sacred to the family although they are Catholic. The trees are deities growing in the garden and giving beauty and health to the family because the decoction from the leaves, nuts and bark is used as a remedy for almost any illness. The walnut trees also provide natural dye in all nut colours. These dyes are thoroughly being examined today. Antje Weinl from Plan Germany has brought a new order – a carpet in natural colours, designed especially for readers of the magazine BRIGITTE. Her colleague Verona Barahona from Quito bends over the woollen patterns, and with astonishment she compares the small cards from the specimen book of coloured ink of the “Pantone Matching Systems”, which help designers and textile producers from all over the world to create the same colours, with the dye from the divine trees in the garden. It is a miracle that the family could fulfil all the wishes of the BRIGITTE Living Department by varying the time the wool is soaked in the decoction. But the family was deeply convinced that they could manage it.
Another benefit of the tree is that it produces the favourite snack of the children. After dyeing the wool, the nuts are fished out of the decoction and peeled out of their soft shell. It is time to have a small break, which is seldom enough. The visitors tell the family that carpets are lying on the floor in Germany. People prefer woollen carpets in warm natural colours. However, the carpets seldom hang as a decoration on the walls, like in the houses of the weavers in Otavalo. “Would you please take off your shoes?” asks the mother Luz Maria, and she is pleased when the children quickly say yes. It sounds like a promise.
When verifying the carpet her family has made before it is shipped, Luz Maria sometimes imagines life in Germany. It is the home country of Sleepy Beauty, but nobody knows anymore how to use a spindle. Luz Maria’s favourite fairytale is about Taita Imbabura, the male local mountain who is so close to the sky and nevertheless goes down to earth in the shape of a small man to help a poor girl with her work. And what is her work? Spinning, of course! Spinning takes 75 percent of the time to produce a carpet. This time can only be shortened by telling stories. It is a story from the Andes, which reminds of Mother Holle and Rumpelstiltskin at the same time, though nothing is spun to gold in Luz Maria’s fairytale.
Every cent the family earns is saved for the children’s education. There are even more children in the family who want to study one day. Maybe little Sarita will be a doctor one day and will be able to treat all the people in the village as properly as they deserve it.
This is Luz Maria’s dream. In order to achieve it, she does without a washing machine and scrubs the white trousers which are part of the boys’ traditional costume with a brush every day. For this reason, the family does not buy an old pickup. They do not have their black-and-white television repaired either. The children do not agree on a TV channel anyway and since the family members are always very tired in the evening, they go to bed at nine o’clock. For this reason, Luz Maria has never been on holidays, not a single week and not a single day. When she goes out, she goes to the cemetery of the village where two of her children are buried. She is a mother of five daughters, four sons – and of two dead babies whom she visits every Monday. This is her life, and she wishes not to change places with anybody else. Only in the morning she sometimes wished she could just stay in bed.
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