Scarce as HEN'S TEETH.

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First, hello out there to my fellow volunteers Leah and Heidi, (unfortunately for them, it's an accident of birth) , NOT Canadians, who have been plagued with curiosity about what I was putting in my blog. By the way, I'm glad you have such appreciation for nuance and subtlety in language use, including the above GEM. Just consider this as Vocabulary Enrichment.

Hi, Heidi's Mom!! Glad you are enjoying my blog! Guess this is my 15 minutes of fame.

And back to my casual observations of life in the (rocky, poorly paved, dangerously driven-on) Slower Lane, and reports of Daily Happenings.

Of late, I have been involved in many computer tasks such as trying to download videos about what to do with the friggin' felting needles when they do arrive. IF they arrive. And I am puzzling about how to teach the women in the craft group to access movie videos on Youtube themselves, if they want to learn more about felting or other arts or crafts. I thought it was a bit too abstract for some of the women - who might never have cared a whit about being on the confounded things (computers that is). Hilde sure didn't jump up and down with excitement when I mentioned going over the instructions on using the computer that I had written and Gerardo translated one morning. Mind you, it might have been because she is already surfing on her own. Amazing resourcefulness in so many of the women here. And lovely people at the same time. I am really going to miss them when I am back in Ontario cursing at having to yank on boots and trudge around in bitter cold.

This felting has been an exercise in flexibility and adaptation. That's a round-about way of saying FRUSTRATION - but only on my part. We had nothing 'rough' to do the initial rolling to make felt ropes, and had to overlap the short fibers of the wool to make one. The women chose to make multi-coloured ones. We used cafeteria trays to line everything up, and we stuck in a length of yarn to try to keep it all together.

We boiled water on the stove, because there is no hot water in most places around here (not even for the showers) and dabbed dish soap on the fibers first. Then sprinkled on the heated water, trying to get it going in the trays first. Because they are old and well used, there was a TINY bit of traction on the surface.

I tried wrapping the ropes of wool in towels to roll, but without the bubble wrap widely used for this step, the wool just got dried out. I had found some METAL SCREEN in the garden supplies, and wrapped it around a plastic table, and tied the ends together underneath with pipe cleaners. We rolled our hands raw on the stuff and eventually got some felting going on, not much. We ended up with hairy blobs hanging off here and there from the ropes. Not really attractive,....

We laughed and laughed at how homely everything was,...so, I haven't really added to their skills for making things in the gallery!

I am going to have to lend my picture to another volunteer, so she will be able to accept the package after I'm gone by putting it into our ID cards from the centre. Ha! Otherwise the post office won't drop it off, - I assume it's addressed to me.

Oh well, I hope they eventually do get to do some needle felting. Once you learn how to do it, it's quite addictive.

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Photos

How ventilation works
in this part of the world: don't close in the bathroom! I look out into Minerva's yard as I stand in the shower.

Hard to describe
but Minerva's house is designed with so much ingenuity. The roof is metal, and doesn't touch the walls. It throws the rain past the sidewalk into a small ditch.

Here's one kind of palm
that I hadn't noticed before in the Botanical Garden at Selva Verde. Red stalks!

This was some kind of tree
to look at on one of the paths at Selva Verde. Maybe the label is legible. I love looking at those buttresses.

Banana Plantations
are responsible for the stripping of the rainforest. Without the biodiversity offered by the rainforest, the habitats and ecolosystems are destroyed. Without the trees the soil near rivers erodes, as seen on the Sarapiqui.

Easy to walk
on this path at Selva Verde, although there were some mucky patches.

Bunch of turtles
sharing a log.

Just thrown together
with cuttings from Minerva's garden. Put together for last week's family gathering.

How not to felt.
The supplies I ordered, namely felting needles, sponges and a few other items, have not arrived. So I found some metal wire in the garden shed to rub the wool against. I rubbed my hand raw. But we had lots of laughs

Trays to corral the water
in the initial wetting stage

Group effort
Getting those ropes to felt together. They were the funniest looking things when we were done. Downright homely.

Assembling the colours
We used a length of yarn as the core for something to hold all the bits together, even though they were all overlapping.

A week or 2 ago
we looked at videos of felting techniques

Lee makes lunch
It was great news when we learned that Hilde who came twice a week to cook and clean is now coming every day. Lee and I were partners that day. He chopped for about an hour and a half.

Volunteers cooking is a thing of the past!
All the meals are Tico style, yummy (Hilde also teaches cooking classes to the tourists who come over from Selva Verde) and Hilde make empanadas from the lunch leftovers if there are any and serves them around 4.