For most of her life, she worked as a coffee collector or prepared meals for farm workers. She didn’t have her own house, so she used to sleep at the farms that gave her the jobs. Sometimes, she had to walk for hours to go to another farm. Sometimes, she would still be on her way to another farm when the night came, so she had to stay the night on the road with her children. Her eldest son had built a house for her later. In the late 1960s, Jaramillo moved to Medellín, Antioquia, with her youngest daughter, Alicia – when she turned 17. All her life she lived with or near her two daughters, while her son moved to another city to live independently.