Greetings from Cochapata

Ellie returns from Peru on August 8th. It will be a joy to see her. She will have been gone two months and, with few exceptions, she has been out of touch for the entire time. In our contemporary world of Twitter, Facebook, email and texting, it seems even more odd to be “off the grid” as it were for so long.

Happily, last Saturday we did have a chance to hear from Ellie. Thanks to the wonders of Facebook Video chatting, we spent about 90 minutes talking to her and we got to see her at the same time!

It was a sort of mid-term break and Ellie and the other volunteers gathered back in Cusco to touch base, re-connect and get a shower. Ellie said the minute they hit town they went from Starbucks to McDonalds and to virtually every fast food place in Cusco. It was a riotous re-connection with civilization.

Ellie says her family is nice. In fact most people in her community seem to be pretty welcoming. The Peruvians tend to be a bit reserved and there is the language barrier, but overall she said they feel welcome. She is called “Gringita.” I can imagine that with her height and blonde hair, she stands out a bit.

Living conditions in her community are pretty primitive. Her family has a dirt kitchen floor. They do have electricity in the form of one hanging bulb and a tv which receives two channels. Ellie shares a room with the 16-year-old daughter in the family. She said the daughter seems very reserved, but Ellie had launched a charm offensive and was determined to make friends.

Ellie and her two partners take meals with different families to spread the burden of feeding extra mouths. She said the primary diet is potatoes and they have potato soup for all three meals most days. Her host mother was incredulous that Ellie was so inept at peeling and cutting potatoes. After some translation issues, Ellie deduced that her host mother was asking if Ellie had kitchen servants. Well, I suppose she does in a way, Jim and I have both had a turn in the kitchen. I don’t think that’s quite the same. Ellie’s host mother was equally incredulous to learn that Ellie’s father cooked and her mother worked in an office. That is only one small indication of the cultural gulf between the community Ellie is visiting and the culture in which she grew up.

Running water in Ellie’s house is the pump in the yard. There are no showers or baths. Obviously, this limited availability of water impacts many aspects of their lives including cooking, cleaning and washing clothes.

Ellie and her partners teach English in the local school and help their families with their animals. School is only held four days a week and some days the teachers don’t show up. The women tend to leave school early because they are needed tending the animals.  Almost every man in the village is a farmer and they are in the fields all day. The children care for the animals which include sheep. Aside from potatoes and the animals which are raised and slaughtered for food, the diet is pretty unbalanced nutritionally. Ellie said the men and women in the community are all very strong from working so hard, but the high percentage of carbohydrates in their diet makes them a little puffy.

Ellie said it is pretty stressful living in such a different environment, but she also feels she has learned a tremendous amount about how many people in the world live and the tremendous challenges people face who live in poverty, cannot afford to get an education and are basically destined to stay in their villages. This is all quite different from the expectations with which we grow up in our society.

The day that Ellie and her partners were to head to Cusco, they were delayed. Their host family for breakfast had killed a sheep in their honor. Ellie watched it being butchered and then they were served sheep’s liver for breakfast. I asked how it was and her response was, ” After three weeks of potato soup three times a day, it tasted pretty darn good.”

As of last week, Ellie was writing in her journal each day. I think she will be grateful to have this account of her adventure. There are bound to be many events which slip her mind. I am very proud of Ellie’s strength, her respect for the culture in which she now finds herself, her newly gained recognition of the benefits she enjoys in life and her desire to contribute to the world. I think that she will have learned so much in the weeks she has spent in Peru and that it will impact her for the rest of her life. I am both filled with admiration of what she is doing and a little envy.

The Yarn Diet

 

It frightens me when I calculate the number of years since I became a knitter. When people ask me how long I have been knitting, I shrink from responding. How in the world could someone as young as I am have been knitting for over forty years? That is a lot of stitches. You know how they always like to calculate how many times something could go around the world? Well, maybe the corollary to that is how big a garment I could have knit with all those stitches—a blanket which could cover our house? An even larger building? Perhaps the town of Rye Brook?

Of course the by product of all those years of knitting has been yarn accumulation. Knitters go to yarn stores. Knitters see yarn they can’t live without and they buy it. It accumulates at a rate that can never be matched by output. Knitters may be more or less forthcoming about how much yarn they have. Some revel in excess, some squirrel their yarn away in discreet caches. Some inventory their stockpile, others go to their maker leaving relatives to sift through bewildering scavenger hunts of half-finished projects and orphaned treasures.

 I believe I have written about this before, but at the beginning of 2009 I went on a pretty serious yarn diet. It had become clear even to me that my stash was a lot like my own private yarn store. Now, I think there are a lot of knitters with this situation. They may or may not be open about it, but I had started to feel like I had just ingested way too many desserts. There was yarn everywhere. I had yarn in plastic bins under my bed. I had a dresser full of yarn. There were three large plastic bins of yarn in the Blue Room and more yarn in plastic bins in the basement. I felt a little ill when I thought of all that yarn and it was time to go on a diet.

Craftaganza Q1 2011

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 These days it seems I never have time to sit and play. If I am not doing something vaguely constructive, then I feel consumed with guilt. Knitting, beading and reading have unfortuantely fallen into the not-so-constructive category. To counter this, I have continued to work on small projects and especially to design items which can use up odd bits of stash.

I actually have really enjoyed having this framework to define what and how I spend my crafting time. Going through my stash and finding partial and single skeins of great yarns with which I have worked in the past is fun. It is one part wander down memory lane and one part creative re-purposing. Ah, look at this moss green yarn…

Gosh, I remember getting this on that small farm up in Maine. We saw the sign by the side of the road and I only had to beg a little to get Jim to turn off. The woman raised sheep in her backyard. They were mostly Romney and she knew each one. She had goats, chickens and dogs, too. Her husband worked for the cable company. I wonder how they made ends meet with his salary and her expenses. In the front yard she had a little shop out of which she sold her yarn and some locally crafted buttons. It was a cute little wooden playhouse. The yarn she had was barely processed and her dyes were a wonderful palette of soft yet rich colors. I designed a vest with the yarn from her place. I had just over a skein left over and it was this skein that became one of the baby sweaters pictured here. Those happy memories are part of the sweater I have knitted.

I still have the goal of taking a table at a craft fair and selling the sweaters, booties, beaded earrings, etc. which I have made. I am curious to see if people will actually buy them, the value they are willing to assign to them and how I feel sending these things off with other people. I think it will be a fascinating exercise and maybe help recoup some of the “investment” I have made over the years in stash and beads. I love the idea that someone might buy one of the sweaters I made for a baby and that then that new mother will have the pleasure of wrapping her baby in warm Romney wool. Or that someone will buy a pair of earrings I have made and that each time they pull them out to wear them they will think how pretty they are. That would be a tremendous rush.

So, I will continue to make things. I enjoy the process more than the product and at some point someone else may well be able to enjoy th product.

Romney MommyBaaaa!Mommy and kids

The 2010 New York Sheep and Wool Festival

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October 16th looked like it would become a perfect fall day. The forecast was for sun with a few clouds and some wind. It was going to get up to the mid-50′s. The leaves were turning nicely and the scene was set for the New York Sheep and Wool Festival! The third weekend in October is always the New York Sheep and Wool Festival. And even those Frosts who don’t knit turn out for this annual family pilgrimage.

We piled into the car at 8:30 and the cars were streaming into the Dutchess County Fair Grounds when we got to Rhinebeck after 10. It was brisk and a hot beverage was first on Ellie’s list while I purchased my annual t-shirt. Each year much is the same about Rhinebeck. The vendors have the same locations, we follow the same path through the barns and even eat the same foods. That is part of what makes it all so wonderful.

We walk around and see all our favorite vendors. The fellow who makes the fantastically warm and soft sheepskin slippers, Ellen’s 1/2 Pint Farm, Nanney Kennedy’s Meadowcroft Farm Seacolors, the woman with the gorgeous and colorful blended yarn from Vermont, Green Mountain Spinnery and the folks with the huge supply of Socks That Rock Yarn. Even when I don’t buy, I love seeing the fabulous yarn and crafts these artisans have on offer.

Each year Peter is bound and determined to return home with an angora rabbit. He sees the women spinning fiber right off their bunnies and he goes wild for a soft, furry bunny.  This year there were puppies for sale and Ellie was possessed by a desire unfulfilled by even her great love for Dakota. They were really cute and if Jim hadn’t been along and if I didn’t know that Dakota has no desire to share, I might have fallen.

Jim is patient, but bored and heads off to sit quietly in the 4-H booth with a cup of hot cider and his book. The best place for him at this point. We walk up and down the rows looking at the booths and break for lunch early. The chicken pot pie line gets really long and one year they ran out for a while…I enjoyed a roast lamb sandwich.

After lunch we wandered over to watch the dogs in the Frisbee competition and then hit the barns to oggle some sheep, goats, llamas and alpacas. It is fun to watch the sales going on, but visiting the animals in their pens is even more fascinating. Here is a whole agricultural life about which we know little, but the sheep are clearly well cared for and loved. Their owners wait patiently for the judging and tend to the animals while probably wishing the dumb city folk would stay out of their way. It isn’t an easy way to make a living no matter how romantic it looks from the outside.

All too soon critical mass has been reached and the voting is to return to the car and make our way home. I wonder what it would be like to spend an entire day or weekend at the fair? Somehow even after just a few hours, the car feels warm and comfortable and it is tough not to doze off over yarn and needles as we head south in the afternoon’s darkening light.

It was a good day. A day anticipated for many months and enjoyed in the best of company. It will be another year until Sheep and Wool and yet, it will be very much the same as this year. A turning point as summer truly fades into autumn and the world prepares for winter. A good day’s outing in the country and a chance to enjoy the fresh air, animals, some good food, my family and lots of yarn and fibre. It doesn’t get much better than that!