Ayde Riveros

Ayde Riveros was born in 1971 in Sacsmarca, Huancavelica, a village high in the Andean mountains. The majority of the population works as farmers and herders of cows, alpaca, and sheep.

She is the youngest of 6 children, 2 girls and 4 boys. It was custom for all the women in her region to knit. Ayde’s mom taught her to knit but didn't like when Ayde broke the spindles and stopped teaching her how to spin and weave yarn from their own flocks. So Ayde secretly took the spindles and yarn from her mom to learn to knit on her own.

The happiest memories of her childhood were when her dad worked in the mines and he was able to buy them shoes and school uniforms and sent them to school. The saddest part of her childhood is that she had to stop studying after her first year of high school because of the terrorism in the country.

"When I started high school, the violence also started, the terrorism, all of that. Since we lived in the country, even higher than Sacsamarca, sometimes the military and the terrorists would come through, and we didn't know what to do in those moments. It was so sad and we were so scared. Both sides fought. There was such a fright from all of that, and so my parents didn't want us to walk to school. So with my other siblings we left Sacsmarca for Huancavelica. Of all of us, only my older brother finished school and now he is a professor. Even now that is the saddest part of my childhood. And the effects of the violence last until now. Sometimes I am scared to speak."

They arrived in Huancavelica in 1993 to escape the violence. Ayde met her husband, Cesar, in the high school that she attended for a short time. Their first child, Jon, was born in 1994 when Ayde was 19 years old. She began to work, doing what she could to provide for her family, mostly washing clothes in the cold streams of Huancavelica. In 2000, she had twins, Anthony and Jaquelin.

During this time, Ayde started to work for an artisan group called Espigas de Oro. "I started sewing sweaters for them, and they held some meetings and workshops but after I sewed four sweaters, they didn't pay me. I kept bothering them but they wouldn't pay so I left the group." She had learned how to finish her products here and developed a reputation as a good knitter. "And after I left that place, I met Yody, the leader of El Mercurio. She came and asked me if I knew how to knit. I said, yes and she asked if I wanted to be part of their group, so I started working with them five years ago."

Ayde no longer has to wash clothes in the cold streams that often left her fingers aching but can now work on what she loves, creating knit products.

At first her husband wasn't very supportive. He knew the other group hadn't paid her and didn't believe this would be any better. "He would come to the workshop and tell me I was wasting my time. Sometimes he can be a little chauvinistic. But then when I began to get paid, I could say, ‘look, I'm supporting the household just like you!’ And now when I have a lot of orders he will cook or clean the house and sometimes help with making the eyes and finishing the finger puppets.”

There are over 40 women in the Mercurio cooperative. Their lives have also been changed by Fair Trade. "The changes are huge. Now we can say, ‘I am helping support the household, just like you.’ It is not a lie that I am working. We want to be equal to men."