Chicken Buses and Weaving

This past Saturday, a group of students traveled to a small village about an hour outside of Xela to visit a weaving workshop. The family that owns the workshop is one of the many people that come to our school during break time to sell their wares, so we'd seen them and some of their goods before. I'd had my eye on one of their blankets for a couple weeks, and it was neat to go to their house and buy it from them after having seen the whole process.

Before I show you that, though, I want to give you a better idea of what the chicken buses I'd mentioned before look like.

We took one from the main market in Xela, and while we were waiting to get moving, I took some pictures of the other buses in the terminal. They are all this brightly painted or even more so. On the top of the windshield, most of them say some variation of "Jesus Lives," "Lord, Guide Me," "God Is Love," etc. Inside, above the driver is often painted something along those lines as well. They are invariably old school buses from the States, and on most of them, the district information is still posted. The bus we took that day was a Blue Bird bus from somewhere in Virginia. It is fascinating and troubling to me that whole sectors of the economy here are based on cast-offs from the States, be it transportation, electronics, clothing, etc. I see so many people wearing t-shirts or sweatshirts from US universities, summer camps, sports teams, company conferences, and the like.

You're out of luck if the bus going where you're going is at the end of the line. We waited at least a good half hour for the buses in front of us to move on. On the left, you can see a man loading stuff on the roof. These men are called ayudantes, or helpers, and they collect bus fare once the bus has left the city, and help to load and unload luggage. It's not uncommon for them to be climbing up and around the bus while it's barelling down the street. Once I was on a bus and I saw the ayudante leave through the back door and come in the front door while we were winding through the mountain, and those rides can be scary enough sitting inside the bus.

Here is one of four looms in the workshop. Five generations of the family work here, making carpets, blankets, and all manner of wonderful, handmade textiles. They own their own sheep and do all the processing themselves from shearing the sheep to the actual weaving. They were very intentional in telling us that the entire process is all natural without using any chemicals to clean or dye the wool.

Here I am spinning the wool into thread. I was surprised by how easily and quickly a lump of carded wool can be made into usable thread. Luis is helping me. My camera ran out of battery before I could get a picture of the rest of the family, which is too bad because they were so nice and very hospitable. If you can get a bigger view of this picture, check out my shins. The bedbugs here have been a little too friendly with me, and I think I may have brought back more with me on the blanket I bought. Just when I had gotten rid of them! Oh well. I guess it comes with the territory. On our family evaluations for the school, the manner in which the family dealt with bedbugs is a question on its own, so it seems like a fairly common issue.

Like many things here, the mechanism for spinning thread is pieced together using whatever extra scraps are around. On either side you can see the soles of old shoes holding the needle on the wheel.

After spinning the thread, they use this to wind it into bigger bundles like...

these. All of these colors come from plants, rocks, insects, or the natural color of the sheeps' wool.

Here are some examples of what they use for dye.

We got to practice weaving on this loom with a fairly detailed pattern. Each of those strings are pulled by hand through the loom, and then using the pedals you can sort of see at the bottom, you switch the threads, and pull the bar on the left back to knot the row in place. It's tedious work, and Luis said that each of these little panels takes a week to complete.

This is a view of the entire workshop. It's hard to see through this loom, but you can sort of pick out the other three in the other corners. The workshop dropped off into jungle, so I couldn't get a broader view. After we had seen the process, they took us back to where they were selling completed textiles and then they fed us freshly made tortillas with beans and cheese and a really good tea with cinnamon.