Full circle and a bit dizzy

We asked the women who received bead boxes and tools at our big meeting to get together this past Saturday for a jewelry-making lesson. Anna was otherwise busy, Jaime was getting ready for a conference, and Susan had chauffeuring duty to tend to. That left only Sharon. No problem. It's only a couple of women...

Five women were waiting when I arrived, and two more came later. We went over making simple loops for earrings and such, crimping with a crimp tool, attaching findings, and more. It was like speed-reading. We covered several lessons worth of material in a couple of hours. OK, three-and-a-half hours.

The Bhutanese women are jewelry animals. They don't want to wait, so they've been guessing about the technical aspects of jewelry making. Their guesses have been mostly wrong, unfortunately. One teacher was woefully inadequate to work with this incredibly eager group. On the other hand, they have an excellent sense of color, and their designs are gorgeous. I hope that going forward we'll have more teachers to work with this very lovely and spirited group.

Fatuma and Khadiga sat in. I was surprised to see them waiting at the table. I tried to enlist their teaching help, but they wanted to review the skills they'll need to teach on Friday.

Friday. Anna, Susan, Katrina, Fatuma, Khadiga and I--and possibly Haiffaa and Sharifo, are going to do a daring and experiential presentation at the TESOL conference, which happens to be in Denver this year. You can read about our presentation topic here. Wish us luck. This has the potential to be great or else an unmitigated disaster.