Ah, #Santa #Fe and its amazing Intl. Folk Fest

That first year, the event that most influenced our growing attachment to Santa Fe was the International Folk Art Festival, which helps entire villages around the world to survive. 

 It is held on Museum Hill, an area apparently zoned for collections of kachina dolls.   Actually, the hill is home to four fascinating museums, including Spanish Colonial Art, Indian Arts, International Folk Art and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian.  Museum Hill is, we supposed, a masterpiece of zoning.

At the Folk Art Market, we went from booth to booth, heard the stories of the makers of the vases, dresses, shawls, baskets, ceramics, embroidery, and lace.  We literally wept our way through the market, seeing it through a mist of salty moisture.                                           

Some of the stories behind the booths at the Folk Art Market included:

        One Russian cooperative employed blind orphans and we imagined the little boys and girls sewing for their suppers. 

A group of village weavers from India were abandoned women who were given the looms that allowed them to stay home with their children and work.  The women eventually earned enough to buy the looms and even a small home, supporting their families and sending the kids to school.

        The indigenous lace makers of Brazil saw their incomes rise from $3 a month to over $100 a month because of the Santa Fe fair.  

        Rebecca Magwasa of South Africa sold us the telephone wire baskets that allowed her to support her children and give all of them a formal education.                       

         Like so many women in Rwanda, the 1994 genocide left Janet Nkubana a widow with no means of support until she began selling baskets, which are made by traditional enemies, Hutu and Tutsi women, working side by side.  One year, the group sold all their baskets at the Santa Fe Market and took home nearly $40,000.  

       And the stories that lead to tears continue:  In 2010, 1,300 items from Zimbabwe and Namibia arrived after the Folk Art Fair was over.  So local volunteers stored, priced, set up and sold over $32,000 worth of baskets and ostrich eggshell jewelry, saving the youth project.

        For Jamuben Kegabhai Aahir from the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India, her participation in the Market was life changing. At the Market, Jamuben helped SEWA, representing 3,500 skilled home-based embroidery and textile artisans, earn over $12,000 in sales—huge sums for artists who normally make $60 per month sewing pillow covers.   

      We embraced this event.  We learned that, because of the hundreds of local volunteers, over 90% of the money collected goes to the villagers.  This was shopping with a larger purpose.   The Market actually eased people’s lives half the world away from us.  More than that, we decided that any place that had people who could create and make a success of such a fine, humanitarian idea was a place where we wanted to be.