As part of our Etsy World Tour series, momerath shares her experiences traveling with her family in Guatemala. In a tiny town, she has a lesson with a local weaver, and she learns about differences in craft, economics and in mindsets.

This is a story about a lesson, and the lessons it taught me, which were not the ones I expected. It's a story about weaving, though no real weaving takes place. And at the end, I'm going to assert it's not about anything at all.

I met Francesca in 2005 in San Juan La Laguna, a Guatemalan village we'd chosen because the guidebook passed it over. I had arrived with my husband and our two-year-old by boat from across Lake Atitlan, fingers crossed that a little hotel we'd heard mentioned truly existed. It did, and it cost $4 a night. San Juan was a town of steep cobblestoned streets, wood smoke, traditional dress, teenagers on cell phones, and a pristine new library. Few vehicles rode through town, other than the occasional taxi truck. Women and children stopped to touch our daughter's gold-blond hair.


After a few days in the village, I asked our hotel owner about the possibility of getting a lesson on a backstrap loom. The backstrap is ubiquitous in Guatemala. I admire craft, and I wanted to see what the work felt like. He put me in contact with Francesca, a weaver. Single and in her 40s, Francesca lived with her mother and extended family in a mud-brick home up the hill. An hour's lesson? I asked. Certainly, she said. We arranged to meet the next day.


When I called at Francesca's house the next morning, she came out to meet me and said we would walk into the village to buy yarn. I confess I was a bit surprised, until I reflected: Was I thinking she had spare supplies just sitting around for people to play with?


After I'd paid for my colors – black, peach, purple, orange – we returned to her home, a mud-brick house with dirt floors and a courtyard sink. She led me to the courtyard, where we sat on stools against a wall. The wind fluttered a dirty tarp curtain hung across a corner, and I saw it concealed a metal bucket: the toilet.

The yarn was more like embroidery floss. And the first step, she said, was rolling it into balls. We spent nearly two hours rolling it, two strands together.

As we rolled, we talked as best we could with my clunky Spanish. It was delightful. We talked about our families, our homes, hairstyles, more. We asked each other questions about our local school systems. She voiced her opinions on Guatemalan politics. Her sister-in-law had a brother in Arizona. Her teenage nephew was a soccer-playing guitar player; my teenage sister was a soccer-playing drummer. I heard myself tell her we didn't live in New York City because the cost of living was too high. She nodded sympathetically.

I told her that I knit (I didn't know the verb, but I knew "yarn" and "needles" and got the idea across). She asked me, “Do you knit for a living?” My internal reaction: “What a silly question! Imagine someone trying to make a living off of knitting.” Immediately I tasted the irony in my mouth.

After two hours of rolling yarn, Francesca got out a big board with posts sticking out of it. I was puzzled: I thought we were going to use a backstrap loom. But no, this wasn't a loom; it was a whole other step before we could use the loom. I didn't quite understand what it was for, and I was beginning to think about my husband reading books to our toddler in the library, wondering when I'd return. Francesca showed me how to wind the yarn in and out among the posts. It required just enough concentration (for me) to make conversation impossible; if I even let my mind wander, I'd lose the pattern. It required keeping both arms up to guide the yarn, and rocking forward and back just enough to start a good, solid backache. I was wiggling on my hard wooden stool on the uneven ground. Man, man, man, what a lot of work.

Then Francesca told me: “That's all we will do today. Tomorrow you can come back and we will start with the loom.”

I was leaving town the next day. I wondered, did we misunderstand each other? I had only wanted an hour's lesson. She told me that in the last lesson she'd taught, a pair of German women had worked there every afternoon for five days to make one scarf. And her loom wouldn't be free to start my project till she finished that afternoon's weaving.

I told her I could not come back. Hoping to compromise, I asked if I could see her loom, maybe watch her work. She brought it out. Half finished was a turquoise cloth with an impossibly tight weave. The combs and spacers Francesca used were just sticks and other bits of wood, but with them she was weaving an intricate pattern of chevrons.

She put the belt around my hips and showed me the motions. After some minutes I finally understood what we were doing, pulling up one level of strings, then the other, but I couldn't push the strings close enough together, couldn't remember which stick to pull on next. We took a few photos of me wearing the loom. And I asked if I could purchase one of her weavings, one I'd admired the other day, a shawl with purple and orange stripes. My bedroom, I told her, was purple and orange.


She asked 25 quetzales for the lesson, and 40 quetzales for the shawl. One quetzal was about 13 cents. She wanted about $5 for a shawl she said was five days' work. I gave her 50 quetzales for it but wished immediately (and still wish) I'd given her much more.

And then I left. Dizzy, exhilarated, and humbled, I lay in bed and wrote for an hour, trying to figure out what I felt.

I'm still trying, I guess.

I had imagined that after my lesson I would brim with respect for the women sitting in courtyards day after day, every day, creating beauty through patient, slow, backaching work. But as with most travel, even what you think you know reveals itself as unexpected, as unfamiliar, as much more than you thought it would be.

Francesca took me through the work as it is, not as I imagined it to be. I had imagined we'd jump right into the picturesque part, the backstrap loom. I thought she'd have some practice piece around — on what? a spare loom? — that she could demonstrate on and then I could try a little, hour's up, thanks a lot. But weaving isn't like that. And neither was our lesson: Francesca spent time with me as part of her life, not as an exhibit in a living history museum.

Craft, to me, was leisure. Craft, to her, was work. I was humbled to recognize I hadn't considered the difference.

Her poverty and my privilege, her skill and my lack of skill – binaries unraveled in the web of conversation, bringing me this reminder: Nothing is ever as simple as we think it is.

It's a gift, to have your assumptions unraveled.


But that's just one thread in this telling. It's not “about” what it taught me. It's not: "Look, I had this moving experience on vacation and I grew from it as a person." It was not a complex world speaking to a simpler world, or a fleshed-out person speaking to a picture. It wasn't a tidy, closed package of a story. It wasn't a story at all. It wasn't “about” me; it wasn't “about” anything. It just was.

As Americans, we often behave as if we assume things are created for us and should cater to us. It's exhilarating, actually, to realize how busily and beautifully the world spins along without us. 


We'd love to hear more about crafting traditions around the world; send your thoughts to the Storque's pitch box and make sure to include the words "Etsy World Tour"!