It's Time to Send Your Grandma A Box of Love...

It's that time of year when Adopt-a-Native Elder is soliciting for sponsors to donate food boxes to Navajo elders--the vast majority of them women who have spent much of their lives raising sheep, carding, spinning and dyeing their own yarns and, with those yarns, weaving beautiful Navajo rugs and blankets that have helped support them and their families financially. Now these lovely elders are often too old to weave much, if at all, and many of them live in impoverished conditions, often in homes without central heat and running water. Linda Myers of Adopt-a-Native-Elder, based in Park City, Utah, has assembled a cadre of guardian angels that deliver food boxes, fire wood and toiletries to the elders, once in the spring and again in the fall. Linda is now looking for volunteers to fund the spring food box runs, and to financially, in a spirit of loving care, "adopt" an Native elder, becoming a sustaining presence in their senior years. For $75 you can donate a great big box of food items and necessities to an elderly artisan in need. Please see their web site at www.anelder.org. 

Life In Florida Can Really Be For The Birds...

Steve and I needed a day away, and after going back and forth on whether to head down to Naples or up to Orlando, we landed on simply heading over to Lowry Zoo, one of our favorite Florida destinations.

 

Lowry Zoo probably gets overlooked by a lot of tourists in favor of Busch Gardens or Disney World, but it really is a lovely place with lots of interactive animal encounters--we also wound up watching preschool children feed crackers to the giraffes and spent time petting (yes, petting) the stingrays.  There are plenty of exotic birds and critters in very "viewer friendly" environments. I can't ever remember being there when it was very crowded. Our favorite destination is the lorikeet house, where you can feed the little guys nectar out of a cup--they'll be your new best friends, for as long as you're feeding them. You can see whose husband has the "Doctor Doolittle effect" with the animals. One little bird hung out on Stephen's knee for a full ten minutes, where critter and hubby had quite a conversation going on. Afterwards we went up to Temple Terrace and had a Middle Eastern meal at Greenland Restaurant, a nondescript looking establishment in a strip mall which served the best Middle Eastern food we've had since coming to Florida, followed by a cup of Turkish coffee at the hookah joint next door. It was a simple--and relatively cheap--day out that rejuvenated our sagging spirits and reminded us of the healing qualities of nature--and winter!--in Florida.

Life is Good...

Sometimes, life is good. Like now, for instance.

Kullakas, the Aymara women's crafts cooperative from Bolivia, is working with the remarkable Rebecca Kousky of the not-for-profit, Nest, looking to perhaps sell some of their products on Nest's very busy web site, and getting some assistance with product design from Nest's professional design consultants. 

The senior women I am working with here in St. Petersburg continue to make lovely little toys for poor children. In January, they painted jigsaw puzzles that we mailed off to our friends affiliated with Vida Nueva Cooperative in Oaxaca, Mexico. Also sent off in the same package were the prenatal vitamins and folic acid from our vitamin collection. This past week, eight of the senior women met and decorated little beany baby type toys with brightly colored fabric paints.  (You can see our little group in the photo above; that "slightly younger" yet tired looking woman in the pink shirt is yours truly, fighting a bad cold--yes, we do get colds down here in Florida, believe it or not.) These little stuffed toys will go overseas with a pediatric medical mission, and will be used to soothe and comfort little patients before and after surgery.

Carol Mitchell and I are working with the local YWCA on the possibility of helping them start a fair trade craft shop. We are collecting lists of fair trade organizations we have worked with that might be potential sources of crafts for their shop.

Several of us are preparing to host a crafts day at the home of Audrey Steele here in St. Petersburg the first Saturday of March. For a donation that will benefit the Vida Nueva cooperative, women are invited to come try their hands at rug hooking, doll making, scrap booking and wax resist Easter egg making, while snacking and socializing, for a few hours or all day, depending on their time and disposition. We look forward to it not only being a great fundraiser, but a great day out together! Audrey is tireless in helping economically disadvantaged women and children; recently she opened her house for a fundraiser that brought in money for a Kenyan orphanage.

And finally, I am looking at the possibility of bringing a show of peruvian "cuadros" to the St. Petersburg area, which I will speak about in a future blog posting. (In the interim, want to know what a "cuadro" is?--just look at the picture accompanying this posting.)

For now, suffice it to say, I am busy, and very happily so. Having so many wonderful projects to keep busy with is exciting as well as deeply satisfying. I am grateful for the opportunity to have fun projects to be able to be a part of with so many good women. As you can see, right now, life is indeed very good!

"Stay Another Day..."

More and more people are traveling to southeast Asia. If you're thinking of taking a trip in the near future to Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos, check out the web site www.stayanotherday.org . Stay Another Day is an "initiative promoting sustainable tourism" with an emphasis on hospitality and crafts organizations that employ the poor, the homeless and the handicap. The web site tells you about organizations, such as Vietnam Quilts and Craft Link in Hanoi, among others, giving you information on how and when to visit them, what kind of experience you can expect to have visiting them, what kind of services or products they provide, etc. Some of the organizations have cafes and cooking lessons, while others having working artisans on site who can show you how to throw a pot on a ceramics wheel or some other of their crafting techniques. It's a wonderful way to help you see behind the typical tourist attractions to have  a deeper encounter with the people and the culture, and view the inside workings of not-for-profits struggling to make a difference in the lives of the economically disadvantaged; organizations that actually want you to come visit and see what they're doing! Stay Another day invites you to have a different kind of experience of a foreign country--a meaningful encounter that can provide better futures for struggling artisans.

www.stayanotherday.org 

Looking to Go to Ghana?

Is anyone out there interested in going to Ghana for a week or two, or three, or more, to work with African children, helping them with their computer skills, or doing art projects that not only actually finance their educations but also assist them in developing self-esteem and a sense of empowerment?

Ellie Schimelman of the Cross Cultural Collaborative is looking for volunteers to come to Accra, Ghana, for whatever amount of time you can spare, to work with the youth affiliated with her art center, located on the African coast. She offers a great opportunity for anyone with computer skills in Word and Publisher, to work with the kids developing their own story books, or for anyone artistically inclined to oversee the kids' handmade paper books project, while enjoying an immersion into African culture and crafts. The kids make beautiful notebooks and journals like the ones in the photo, which are sold to help pay their school tuitions. 

For a very modest fee, Ellie will provide you with room and board at her seaside art center and bed and breakfast while you're working with the kids. Having lived in Ghana for twenty years, she is very familiar with local and regional artisans, and can arrange for you tailored-made arts and crafts trips and experiences with professional African artisans based on your own wants and needs. If you don't necessarily want to work with children, but would love to go to Africa to experience its rich culture and artistic heritage firsthand, Ellie offers yearly crafts tours in Ghana, usually in January or during the summer, as well as the opportunity to simply come and be at her arts center, and plan your own agenda, with her wisdom and assistance if you so choose.

I would also request that, if anyone knows of a market for these notebooks, or would be interested in selling them yourself, please contact Ellie at aba@culturalcollaborative.org. Cross Cultural Collaborative's web site is http://culturalcollaborative.org : take a look at all the wonderful options they offer for travel and crafts adventures in Ghana. And thanks for taking a moment to think of ways we might help these African children continue to sell the lovely notebooks and journals to a wider audience.

Building a Nest for Poor Women Artisans

I have had the good fortune to be in touch with Rebecca Kousky, the young founder of Nest. Nest is a not for profit organization dedicated to changing the lives of women artisans in developing countries by helping them build entrepreneurial arts and crafts businesses. Nest helps artisans start up or expand crafts businesses through micro-credit loans which they use to purchase supplies with which to create their crafts or run their businesses. Artisans repay their loans not with money but with their products, which Nest then sells online. Nest also sells the arts and crafts of more established artisans. A percentage of the proceeds from sales by these craftswomen are set aside to provide micro loans for other artisans.

Rebecca has very kindly agreed to work with our friends in Kullakas Cooperative, seeing what she might be able to do for them in terms of marketing their products, or perhaps giving them advise for creating new products that appeal to young people. For their part, Kullakas is meeting in Bolivia this week to decide how to proceed with working with Rebecca and Nest. It is an exciting collaboration, the results of which are still uncertain, but I will remain grateful to and humbled by Rebecca for her willingness to investigate a possible collaboration with the women.

Please take a look at Rebecca's web site: www.buildanest.com . She also as a great blog http://nest-buildanest.blogspot.com , and there is a fabulous little video, taking maybe 6-7 minutes, of an interview with Rebecca on CNN on their news show "Young People that Rock".

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/living/2007/08/10/ypwr.intv.rebecca.kousky.cnn

Rebecca definitely is a "young person who rocks", and one who is working tirelessly and selflessly to create a better world for women artisans. Consider her web site next time you need a gift that you know will do double duty--making the recipient happy, as well as providing an artist in the developing world with the gift of an income.