Mary Annette Grove

Brigham City, UT
Junior, Psychology and Anthropology
Utah State University

Women in Poverty: An Ethnographic Description

INTRODUCTION

I stand choking on the dense smoke from a wood fire inside a compound built of mud bricks. I begin to wish that the cool June breezes from the beach about one mile away would blow up the cliffs and into the room. Ten foot high mud brick walls hold the air and smoke in the room and keep any breeze out. The mud brick walls are topped by wooden poles that hold up a roof constructed of woven plant based materials. A little light filters down to the hard packed and uneven grayish brown dirt floor. Placed over the fire is a gray metal twenty gallon cooking pot. I stir the contents of the pot with a large metal ladle. I am helping to prepare oatmeal at one of many Club de Madres in Huanchaco, Trujillo, Peru. The thin gruel consists of approximately three gallons of water to one Kg. of enriched oatmeal. Two cups of sugar and some pieces of vanilla bean are added to sweeten and flavor the mixture. Mothers who belong to this particular Club de Madres will soon appear at the door with their old one gallon latex buckets and plastic pitchers. Each will receive a ladle or about one cup of oatmeal for each person in their family. Right now though I stir the Quaker, choking and tearing, all the while reminding myself why I decided to come to Huanchaco.

I begin my five weeks of research by contacting Dra. Sandra Alvares Castillo at the state office of women and development affairs (DEMUNA). Dra. Sandra is an intelligent, well dressed woman who cares about the women with whom she works. She tells me that sixty percent of the population of Huanchaco live below the poverty line in Peru. The Vaso de Leche program was started to combat hunger among the poor in Peru. The Clubs de Madres are the method of distribution for the oatmeal that is supposed to give children one meal a day. There are some eighty clubs that serve meals to six thousand poor children in Huanchaco. Food is only one of the problems facing these children and their mothers.

Many women do not receive financial support even when living with the father of their children. Spousal abuse is common. When men and women do separate, the children stay with the mother. The men rarely give the woman money to help her support their children. Dra. Sandra is often put in the position of the intermediary between the mother and the father. The mother will come to tell her that the children need shoes for school. She asks Dra. Sandra if she would please talk with their father. When Dra. Sandra talks with the father, he often says that he does not have the money due to lack of work, because he does not make enough money to support two families, or because he has spent the money elsewhere. Sometimes the father disappears altogether. Only twenty percent of the women without male support work. The other eighty percent stay at home with their children. Dra. Sandra also said that even if this eighty percent wanted to work there are no jobs available for them.

When men leave the mothers of their children these women are left without support and often unable to fulfill the most basic needs of their families. These women are not always adequately educated to provide an income. The venues to change this situation are perceived to be the responsibility of the men. This leaves women with no voice or vehicle to change their lives and the lives of their children.

In this paper I will provide the story of one woman who lives in poverty in the shanty towns on the cliffs above Huanchaco with the hope of giving women who live in poverty voice in ways they may not typically have voice. Those who work with women who live in poverty will then have an additional intermediary to use in their efforts to help the single mothers with whom they work.

BACKGROUND

I am a single mother of five children working and attending Utah State University to obtain a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and Anthropology with a minor in WomenÕs Studies. For the last two years I worked as an Americorps Vista with a non-profit organization who helped single mothers become self-reliant. While working with these women I had many experiences that caused me to wonder if women around the world struggle with similar problems.

Susie *

Susie opens the door to her home. She is one of the hundred or so women I have been working with over the past two years in the United States. She lives in a cramped one bedroom apartment with her son who is two years old. She would like to move to a different apartment because her neighbors deal in drugs. Frequently she finds drug paraphernalia outside her home in the areas where she would like to let her son play. The father of her child ran off when he found out that she was pregnant. He provides no financial support. She has a part time job working in a restaurant but it does not pay enough for her to pay rent and buy food and diapers. She often loses this kind of poor paying job because she cannot find reliable childcare for her son. Occasionally Susie works late and has to walk several miles home because she has no transportation, other than the city buses, and they do not run late at night. She walks to the home of the woman who provides childcare and then, often carrying her son, walks to her home. Today she is smiling. She tells me that she is expecting another child. I later find that again, the father of this child abandons Susie leaving her to care for her son and now another child on an inadequate income.

In both Northern Utah, United States and in Huanchaco, Trujillo, Peru, women living in poverty have similar needs. They need to be able to provide for themselves and their families.

METHODS

My time in Huanchaco was limited to a five week period so I decided to piece together the needs of women who live in poverty using several different approaches. According to the non-profit organization, for which I worked in the United States, these needs can be grouped into six areas and collectively called a "safety net"**. These areas are: education, income/employment, housing, transportation, childcare, and access to healthcare. The safety net needs to be in place in the motherÕs life in order for her to be able to adequately provide for her family.

For my research in Huanchaco, I used participant observation, unobtrusive observation, and ethnographic interviews to learn about the obstacles poor women face in their daily lives, framing my observations and conclusions in terms of my understandings of these universal, basic needs.

Due to my language barrier, interviews were conducted, where possible, in English with those who work with single mothers in a social service capacity. Unobtrusive observation and participant observation were used in places where I had difficulty communicating; specifically at the Clubs de Madres and with the mothers themselves.

DISCUSSION

Huanchaco is deceptively charming. It appears to be quite small and is full of square tightly joined buildings painted red, yellow, green, blue, orange, and aqua, nestled snuggly against the grayish-brown sand and rock cliffs that rise, scarred by time and water that no longer flows through them to the ocean. Huanchaco follows the gentle curve of the beach in the shape of a crescent moon. However, shanty towns have grown from the bare earth above the cliffs to fill the space between themselves and finally between Huanchaco and Trujillo (a large metropolis some twenty minutes away) in the last ten to fifteen years. Huanchaco is now a city of fifty thousand people, the bulk of which live in the shanty towns.

In Huanchaco there still exists an intricately woven reciprocal society where socioeconomic status is based on service to the community not to the acquisition of wealth. It is often the husband who determines the social position of the family in the community. In Peru, men perceive their role to be that of decision maker and provider for their wives and children. This leaves the responsibly of having and raising children to the women. Once the man leaves, the entire burden of providing for the children is left to the woman. Many of these women live in poverty on the cliffs above Huanchaco with little or no support from the fathers of their children.

How are women to find jobs if they are not adequately educated and if there are no jobs available? If a woman has a low paying job how is she to pay for food let alone childcare, healthcare, housing, and transportation? How is she to get to and from work and still maintain her home if she has inadequate transportation and must spend much of her time just getting from one place to another to accomplish things like grocery shopping? If she is one of the fortunate twenty percent of women to be employed, when she does not have enough money to pay for dependable childcare or quality healthcare, will her employer continue to employ her if she repeatedly misses days of work? "AnaÕs" story, presented below, illustrates the obstacles that poor women in Huanchaco face and their coping strategies.

Ana *

My son Wesley and I receive a broad, friendly smile and the traditional Peruvian hug and kiss when Ana opens her door. Ana invites us into her home. We step down from the dirt and rock that is the street in front of AnaÕs home onto an uneven but hard packed and swept dirt floor. Red chairs and a red couch in faux leather brighten up the room that is approximately 15'x20'. Light filters in through the woven roof and through the one window that is located just to the left of the door. It is covered with a thin and fading red, white, and blue piece of cloth with a square pattern and ragged edges. The mud brick walls retain their grayish-brown color on the inside of her home. One of the red chairs sprouts a cream colored crocheted or tatted lace adornment. They are in good shape but for the leg of one chair that is supported by a miscellaneous mud brick. A small shelf holds a few toys for AnaÕs children. On the other side of the room there is an old wooden kitchen table that was once painted cream and then pale blue. The paint is cracking and pealing from the legs. The top is now bare wood. Four white, red, and brown place-mats and four mismatched chairs are placed around the table. There are two doorways in the back of the room. One doorway is covered with the same material that covers the window. It is a larger piece that goes from the top of the doorway to about one and one half feet from the floor. AnaÕs television is on in the bedroom. The other doorway has been left uncovered. She invites us back to this area as she prepares the meal we are to share with her.

Here there is a large L shaped compound that is divided into two areas each approximately 15Õx20Õ and 15«x40«. AnaÕs kitchen/work area has the same dirt floor, mud brick walls, and a ceiling (half of which is covered with the woven roof material). This room contains a weathered wooden table that holds three plastic tubs that she uses to wash dishes and clothing. It also serves as a storage place for her clean dishes. Beside it are two large twenty gallon buckets that hold water drawn from a single spout that provides water for a two hour period each day. Once this water goes off, Ana is forced to haul water in these buckets from the community spout to have water for herself and her three children. Above this table hangs a three pocketed old apron. It contains a single toothbrush a small tube of toothpaste in one pocket, an ink pen in another and a comb and brush in the last pocket. Across the room another table holds a four plate gas camping stove. The propane tank sits on the floor next to this table. Her cooking pots are stored on the stove top.

The last part of AnaÕs compound holds three small coups for her five chickens, a small and dying tree, an old oil barrel full of old shoes, and one long line strung from one side of this part of the compound to the other as a clothesline. A small pair of pink underwear hangs from this line, held in place by a single plastic clothespin. Ana has no bathroom in her home so a corner of this area is reserved for that purpose separated by a four foot long, three to four mud brick high wall that affords little privacy.

Many of the residents of this part of Huanchaco have built illegally on government land and are subsequently susceptible to loosing the homes that they have built themselves. Ana is one of these. She may be forced from her home because the government wants to expand the local airport. Her home and that of many others in the area either have been or are being threatened by the expansion of the Huanchaco airport.

In addition to problems with income/employment and housing, Dra. Sandra said that for those women who do work there is frequently inadequate childcare. There are childcare centers in Huanchaco, however, there is not an adequate number of childcare providers. Often children are left with a relative or if needed and old enough left alone at home while their mother works.

Ana does not work and so stays at home with her three small children eighteen months, four years and nine years. She was married but her husband worked sporadically often spending the money he made, drinking with friends. He was also abusive. Ana is often without financial support for herself or her children. She is able to infrequently find work providing childcare to the wealthier women in Huanchaco and occasionally for tourists. This work is not steady but she is able to bring her children with her. She is not sure what she would do if she had a steady job and needed childcare.

Ana spends her days at home with her children. She gets up and fixes breakfast for her children. She spends the morning cleaning their home and washing their few clothes. Laundry is washed by hand in tubs of water drawn from her single spout. The clothing is scrubbed piece by piece with soap, rung out, and washed again. They are then turned inside out rinsed several times, rung out and hung to dry on the line. Each time Ana must take clean water from the twenty gallon buckets that hold the water she draws from the spout in her compound. Because of the humidity, drying time can be a day or two.

Ana fixes lunch between twelve and one o'clock p.m. In the afternoon she goes to market, plays with her children, and watches television. She tries to get oatmeal from the Club de Madres to which she belongs to provide her children with dinner. After dinner, she cleans again, doing dishes, laundry, or whatever else needs to be done.

Transportation is also a problem for Ana. She often shops at the bodegaÕs close to her home rather than in Huanchaco or Trujillo where the food is cheaper. She has no method of refrigeration or storage of perishables. With her very young children it is difficult to transport the needed groceries and supplies up the steep cliff paths to her home above Huanchaco on a daily basis. The bus from Trujillo would be a twenty minute bus ride, one way, in old, bumpy, and frequently over packed buses with children and bags of groceries in tow. To ride in a Taxi would cost her ten soles. She does not have that kind of money.

She also does not have money for healthcare. When her children become ill she must rely on her knowledge of herbs and traditional folk medicine. Although Ana was not able to tell me about these I was able to observe a cleansing/diagnostic method, called Limpia, using a raw egg and a glass of cool water. The egg is rubbed on the individuals head for about 1-2 minutes. The person is then told to breath on the egg. The egg is rubbed back and forth and in circles on the personÕs body from the shoulders to the back and down each leg from the buttocks. The rubbing moves to the upper front part of the body to the stomach, and again to the legs. The temperature of the egg is observed while the rubbing is taking place. At the end of the rubbing the egg is carefully cracked into the glass of water. Each half of the broken egg shell is dipped into the water and poured out into the glass. The appearance of the egg is examined to diagnose the illness. Ana was also taught how to use herbs to help with her families illnesses by her mother.

In Huanchaco it is becoming more acceptable for young women to become educated. A popular way for a family to improve their income is to have a member of the family learn English, apply for, and receive a job working ten to twelve hour days for, four to six hundred dollars a month on cruise ships. This would not be an option for women with children.

CONCLUSION

I see a dichotomy of financial means in Huanchaco. I stayed in a Hostal and went to events in the homes of people who did not live in mud brick homes with dirt floors and woven roofs. They had hot and cold running water and flushing toilets. Electricity brought power for computers and lines for telephones into their homes. Refrigerators kept their food from spoiling. Many had vehicles. I went into the homes of women on the cliffs of Huanchaco who did not have any of these. I admire their strength of will to keep going day after day without many of the basic necessities that others in Huanchaco do have.

This paper did not attempt to provide solutions to a problem that is well beyond a five week research project. However, if solutions are planned to help these women, the women themselves need to be a part of the process. As women are already being given the responsibility of providing for their children in ways that men have traditionally viewed as their responsibility, then women need access to the decision making processes that affect their lives (and subsequently the lives of their children). Women need access to education, social and political groups, and well paying jobs.

I would like to come back in one or two years and research the ways in which tourism affects these women. Does tourism provide them greater access to better paying jobs? Are their ways in which the tourism industry could, as it begins to emerge and grow in Huanchaco, include women living in poverty in the decision making processes? Could there be collaboration between these two groups?

The most obvious problem that I have had in Huanchaco has been the language barrier. Having a solid grasp of Spanish would have allowed me to collect more information from the single mothers themselves. Unfortunately, not being able to communicate completely with the women has limited me to observation which, while important, limited the kind of data that I could collect.

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* The names of the women with whom I have worked have been changed to protect their identities.

** The self-help education program "The Road to Self-Reliance" and the "Safety-Net" were written by Karen Mecham.