Here in Norfolk, we are losing some of the country skills. Eric, the reedcutter and marshman, retired recently, and it has been difficult to find people prepared to do the work; it doesn’t pay much, it’s seasonal, and it’s tough. But if no one cuts the reed, then there’s no raw material for our Norfolk thatched roofs. (Yes, you can use straw, but it’s not the same. It doesn’t look right.) So the whole landscape could change…

I find crafts are often a good way of meeting people. I am an amateur woodworker and I find carpenters, wherever I go, are good down to earth people I can have a good chat with. I usually smell them first… the sweet spicy odour of cedarwood or the resin of pine being cut…

Thanks for this beautiful piece. I was in Teotitlan del Valle last fall and just received an e-mail from one of the weavers there who asked it there was anything at all I could do–set up a website? circulate photos of his incredible rugs?–to help them cope during this period when tourism, as you noted, has dried up completely. I haven’t answered him yet because I do feel a profound responsibility to help him in some way–for immediate, concrete purposes, but also for more abstract, harder to explain reasons, not the least of which is my desire to see this incredible tradition passed on to at least one more generation. I think the answer–at least partial–to your question about what we can do is this: Don’t just simply buy a rug and then go home. Start thinking about human contact and connections in a deeper, more sustained way, and find a way to stay in touch, to hear people and to –as you have here–keep telling their stories, taking them to places where they can’t go themselves, where they have little or no voice.