Crafting Abroad

As many of you already know about me, I love a good craft.  So when our service team needed a volunteer to help coordinate a craft for our time in San Jose, I shot my hand right up.

Finding the right craft took time.  It needed to be something that was easily transported on the plane ride down, cost effective, and would be somewhat useful for the people. 

Agros had shared with us the importance of Mother’s Day in Nicaragua.  Celebrated at the end of May, this holiday holds even more importance for Nicaraguan mothers and families than in the states. Since we were traveling to San Jose at the beginning of May, it seemed like a perfect fit to structure a craft around Mother’s Day.

We chose canvas bags that could be decorated and given to the mothers in the village.  Cool, right?  What mother wouldn’t love a bag to carry laundry, groceries, or whatever else. But here’s the best part, the husbands and their kids decorated them.

 

As the men sat down in the school desks awaiting instructions, they looked like deer caught in headlights. Petrified. Nicaragua, like many Central American countries, has very traditional roles for men and women.  Women do the cooking, laundry, home keeping etc. And the men, well, they don’t.  Here we were asking them to step WAY out of their comfort zones and decorate something. They did just that, and it was awesome to watch.

One of the women on our team had the brilliant idea to bring some stencils that she had lying around her house. These were a life saver. Once we showed the men how to use them, they latched onto those stencils like life rafts.

The men stenciled two, sometimes three and four different stencils on their bags, carefully picking different colors for each of them. I was surprised by the detail and effort that each of these husbands put into their bags. They were certainly labors of love, and I dare say that these men might just have enjoyed themselves while they were at it.

Remember Terencio?  He proudly showed me his bag after it was completed, going through each of the decorations that he had chosen for his wife. He was especially proud that he had written her name on it.

We told the men to wait and give their wives the bags as a present for Mother’s Day, but some just couldn’t wait.  Here is one mother who received her gift a little early.

This project was one of the highlights of my trip.  Seeing those men labor over their bags with such love was an unexpected joy for me. And knowing that their wives would be receiving a gift that was evidence of that love made this craft, in my eyes, a success.