Clara Murillo Pinto

My mother and father are from Piura in the north west. My father was an ice cream seller and my mother was a housewife. They had eight children. During the summer holidays, they sent us to boarding school, which was run by nuns. I lived at boarding school all through January, February, and March - for three months, so my father could sell ice cream on the beach during summer. He started selling ice creams but then he saw that fishermen were earning good money, so he decided to go out to sea; Lorenzo Murillo Calderón was his name, better known as Cholopancho. My mother then started selling fruit to the fishermen, because my father said they always needed food to take with them, so she’d sell bananas, apples, and other fruit as a side-business.

By age 13, I was also selling fruit in the business with my mother. At that time everything was so beautiful, the quantity of fish - what is, big squid. In winter I went to school but because of work I never ended up finishing school... the teacher told me I was clever, and she was right, I was savvy in my mother’s business. I told my mother to stop selling fruit and start making ceviche and so we started selling fried fish and ceviche and customers flocked. I studied until the second year of high school, but then I didn’t study anymore because my brain couldn’t keep up, it couldn’t retain anything; now I know that on top of feeding the belly, you have to feed the brain. I know how to read and write, add and subtract, but I don’t know how to multiply. I run the business by doing addition and subtraction. A few months ago, my sons-in-law came to help me, one is a systems engineer and the other is an architect. They used a calculator and I beat them doing maths faster in my head. If you tell me what eight times eight is, I can’t tell you, but if you ask me for three kilos of sea bass, I can add it up faster than a calculator. You are not ignorant if you can’t read or write. You learn from life.