HONDURAS -

Crafts in Honduras, an Aid to Artisans Project

Aid to Artisans began in 1976, and b ec ame ac ti ve and effec ti ve i n bringing artisans to market in the 1980s, with programs called the Marke t Lin k and the Marke t Re ad in e ss Pr ogr am. T h e Honduras Project was ATA’s first large-scale project and the proving ground for its practical methods. It’s a long way from there, the highlands of Honduras, to here, the trade shows of New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and Atlanta,but ATA has become a trusted guide on that complicated journey.

IN HONDURAS, AN AID TO ARTISANS PROJECT My assignment as marketing manager for the Honduras

I was hired as the Marketing Manager, based on my

Project was to figure out how to increase markets for

experience in a craft importing business that my husband

artisans. I needed to become familiar with existing hand

and I had, in considerable innocence and ignorance,

skills, everyday products, popular colors, available,

started in the late 60s, and sold a dozen years later. We

inexpensive and sustainable materials. We needed to

knew first-hand the many pitfalls and possibilities of craft

identify entrepreneurs as well as artisan communities, and

exporting and importing.

match their potential with U.S. market appetites and needs.

This isn’t a report. It’s a personal, limited and informal record through the photographs I took in those early years

There was money because the U.S. Government was

(1984-85). We went to Honduras often, we liked the people

involved. (Involved in not so obvious ways, this was the

and the beauty of the country, and the crafts we developed

ti m e o f the C o ntra s i n N i ca ra g ua ) . An a rti s a n

with the talented designer, Holland Millis, have endured

development project, working with women, small farmers,

and expanded ever since. Honduras changed my own

and other poor but capable people, must have appealed to

focus too. It was deeply rewarding to discover that my

the US Ag ency for Dev elopm ent beca use it wa s

oddly assembled background in craft importing was

uncontroversial. No one actively dislikes crafts.

exactly what was needed.

Hence

Honduras led me to dedicate

ATA received a two-year grant for about $500,000, the

more than twenty years to this kind of work around the

first large enterprise for ATA whose major activity had,

world as president of Aid to Artisans.

until then, been its small grants program. The Honduras Project was very successful. Planned by an international

Clare Brett Smith, November 2011

development specialist, Ray Manoff, it was direct, modest, professional and practical. Its goals were to develop the artisan sector through product design, to establish export markets and to set up a sustainable export company.

For dates and details, Aid to Artisans has an interesting Case History

a vailable online. www.aidtoartisans.org.

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Honduras, once dubbed a “Banana Republic”

Outside Tegucigalpa

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Cabbage Patch

Cattle Country

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I am a photographer as well as a crafts consultant, and I can’t help but wonder why I have relatively few photographs of Honduras itself, very few with a “sense of place”.

Ho ndura s i s a n a g ri c ultura l country, and a beautiful country, with pine-forested mountains, a dramatic coast with islands and coral reefs. We were often working in fascinating hard-to-reach rural areas. (Left, Burge on a footbridge in Copan) I suspect I was too involved, too active with the artisans and their work, to step back and see the whole picture, to be the observer and audience also.

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Family food plots crowd a steep hillside 7

A wide fertile valley reserved for tobacco, Copan 8

Field boss and worker’s kit, machete and water gourd 9

Landing strip, Roatan, Bay Islands

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Coral fan and a wrecked freighter that formed additional reef habitat, Roatan 11

Identifying common hand skills - thatch in a palapa 12

Recycled outdoor lighting 13

Hand skills - utility rope work

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Hand skills - more practical rope work 15

Basket weaving, Comayagua

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Hand skills - in the cemetery at Suyapa, the custodian carved and maintained the grass with hand clippers..

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Hand skills (and humor) - rock band of carved and painted coconut shells

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Skills - Garden statuary, modern Maya stone carving

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Ruins in Copan. We hoped to design products derived from the Maya traditions.

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Copan detail

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We looked for stone carvers. Maybe garden statuary or tabletop figures would sell well abroad. The small figure to the left was adapted from a Mayan relic, given a drum-like central hole, and we called it a napkin ring. Napkin rings in any form were then hot market items.

And so it might have been, but the only skilled stone carver we found was unwilling to train assistants making production impossible.

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Style & Color There wa s not much i nteres t a mong Hondura ns for na tura l wood fini s hes , natural fibers or unglazed terra cotta.

Perhaps there was too much earth-tone in their lives already. Looking around, it was obvious that bright colors, shine and glitter we r e t he l o c a l c ho i c e s . H o nd u r a ns preferred, as one artisan said, Puro PlĂĄstico!

The U.S. market trend at that time, however, was anti-glitter and intent on beige, natural forms and simplicity. The Honduran palette was hot pink, yellow, turquoise and lime green, and it seemed unlikely there would be a local market for Aid to Artisans’ restrained products.

We also needed to find entrepreneurs, wi lli ng mi ddlemen, a g ents , ex porters , business people at the small business level.

Big business was in lumber, tobacco and cattle. There was no prestige and little profit in artisan products. We needed to show that small craft businesses which require little start-up capital, can support artisan families and their communities.

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PAPAGAYO FEATHERS * Color

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The Bay Islands

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Tegucigalpa

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Tegucigalpa Restaurant

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Tegucigalpa neighborhood

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Still pink, though slightly subdued, in Valle de Angeles

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Entrepreneurs at the bus stop in Comayagua

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.... and deep in the countryside 31

There were occasional obstacles. Our baggage was searched at a check point.

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We were closely observed as we came to this picturesque colonial village, San Antonio Oriente

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Getting to know the place and the people: the best beans in Honduras came from this Santa Lucia kitchen.

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A wedding in Copan, site of the Maya ruins of the Meso-American glory days. Clearly the Maya still live.

Look at the bride’s face! The ancient features prevail even with the pink slip that shows throough her wedding dress and the omnipresent Coca Cola sign.

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Honduran Romeo

Mayan face in the Chavez workshop

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Above, a girl in La Entrada and, right, a daughter of Saul, the metalsmith

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Men of Copan 38

Women of Copan 39

Working animals, oxen, horses and donkeys are much more evident than tractors or trucks in the Honduran countryside.

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Valle de Angeles 41

TERRA * Clay Clay is available almost everywhere in Honduras, simple red clay. Every roof in almost every village, like Santa Lucia, is red clay tile. We found the workshop and kilns of the Andrews family on the side of the road, where a few of their flower pots were set out. Skilled potters, they, especially Memo and Margarita, have worked with Aid to Artisans and with the new export companies, AMANO and ATUTO. Their basic production was, and still is, flower pots, and they readily learned to follow the specifications of important large-scale U.S. buyers like Smith & Hawken and Viva Terra.

In Yarumela another home-based pottery production was based on the annual production of nativity scenes. Millis persuaded the women to add wings to figures of the baby Jesus, and the resulting cherubs, similar to Italian cherubini, were immediately popular. Realists, the village women furnished the cherubs with boys’ genitalia, explaining that girls could not run around without panties. But when Save the Children’s catalog order came the cherubs had to be sexless. Problem solvers, like most artisans, the women simply made fat legs or added musical instruments.

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Memo and Margarita

The Andrews family and Holland Millis

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Mixing clay at the Andrews workshop

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Andrews family potter 46

The source of clay for the cherubs in Yarumela: The pasture belongs to a dairy farmer who permits the potters to dig, if they maintain the fence so his cows will not fall into the hole.

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Potter Rosita’s home in Yarumela

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Rosita’s family at home

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Women potters of Yarumela. Josefa, in light blue dress, would not smile for this picture, but I was told that she bought new teeth with her cherub earnings, and now her smile is a ready one 50

At the ATA office, cherubs were inspected before shipment. The women were tricky and tested Chris Costello and Holland Millis, to see if they could spot the cherubs with imperfections, such as a missing wing. (They could, and rejected them.)

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In Yarumela, Purita, left, the group leader, tried to convince the group that it would be worthwhile to make cherubs ahead of time, not just at Christmas, in order to develop year-round income. The dubious potter, right, could not believe that she was being asked to put wings on the baby Jesus and to remove his private parts.

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Above, the cherubs before and after surgery. Below, details of a page in the Save the Children Catalog 53

MADERA * Wood Honduras mahogany has been prized by boat

and dragged out. Foreign buyers increasingly

builders and furniture makers for hundreds of

understand and respect this. Today wood

years, and we hoped to build on its reputation.

products often need certification that they

But tropical wood requires a year or two to dry

have been sustainably harvested.

in northern workshops before it is stable

away from the design and development of

enough for a Chippendale chair or a fine

Honduran wood products and into products

wood-hulled boat. Small pieces, however. do

using fast-growing sustainable materials, grasses,

not crack and warp upon changing climates, so

corn husks, palm fronds and vines.

We moved

we designed small items, bowls and spoons.

Millis showed the carvers how to make designs

In recent years organizations like Greenwood

directly from nature, palm and banana leaves

and Rainforest Alliance have developed

in particular.

sustainable forestry programs. Greenwood, for example, combined appropriate technology

Mahogany was hard to acquire as forests were

and innovative methods in furniture for the

controlled, we had heard, by the military and

local market. They tighten chair joints by

we were not “connected�. More important to

drying the newly-cut green rungs in place, and

us was the understanding of environmental

weave the seats with local vine.

concerns, the rarity of mahogany, and the fact that mahogany trees grow slowly and stand alone in a forest. A lot of collateral damage ensues when a fine old mahogany tree is cut

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Right, a giant Guanacaste tree in San Juancito

Rural pit sawmill

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Fine mahogany furniture made for the regional market. Right, Leila Odeh, the owner 57

Patterns from nature 58

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Checking production in the Chavez wood carving workshop: Many people helped to make the Honduras Project successful and lasting, lasting being the real measure of success, I believe. Among them, one person stands out as the most effective, imaginative and forceful, Holland Millis. Holland is an artist and designer, a linguist, and business-oriented too. During his Peace Corps years in Kenya and Ghana, he discovered that his talents were perfectly suited to craft development. He can make something out of anything, even a few pine needles. In fact, he probably can’t resist making things.

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His great gift is in helping artisans where, as the Good Teacher, he lets the student carve. Only his own body language shows that he is carving too. The designs in Honduras took shape in his mind and hand and what is now a definable Honduras craft tradition is his.

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Guitar bodies from local wood

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TUSSA * Cornhusk Cornhusk is waste material. Even goats don’t chew it and it’s free. Gathered before the heavy rains, and in the right hands, it can also be a beautiful material.

With funds from USAID and from the Honduran government,

ATA taught the women to make cornhusk into della Robbia style flowers, fullblown roses and wreaths,

found them a market, and what a market! They

recived an order from the US for 180,000 flowers and they named their group Un Milagro al Campo, a miracle in the country. They had never before experienced success, recognition nor cash income. There were production problems but they solved them and trained more women. When they ran out of cornhusk, they hired their menfolk and a truck and drove to nearby Nicaragua where the rains had not yet damaged the cornusk.

They knew they could do it – that was the real miracle.

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Resourceful!

Everyone loves flowers 66

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Cornfields, milpas, a long climb from the village 68

Cornhusk waste

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Los Infiernitos is a tough place to live. Steep, rocky, scorched by the sun and scoured by wind, it’s green only in the short rainy season. Most of the year it’s a hard land of meager crops and no jobs.

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Tussa artisans in Los Portillos 71

Ricardo Martinez, an airline executive and brother of ATA’s bilingual secretary, was just the kind of entrepreneur we hoped to find. He formed a commercial company, AMANO, to manage production, ship, promote and sell the cornhusk flowers. Because the flowers were made at home, this involved regular round-trips by truck to deliver materials, collect products and make payments. It was hard to be efficient traveling the dirt roads between Los Infiernitos, Los Portillos, Sabana Gande and the export center in Tegucigalpa. His dedication to improving the lives of these hard-working artisans was both admirable and essential.

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Millis explained to the artisans that they would need a lot more cornhusk to fill the orders.

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Tussa training session

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A few members of Un Milagro al Campo 75

AMANO set up a packing and shipping center in Sabana Grande.

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This wreath was a huge success in the New York and Dallas trade shows.

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Because markets require something new every season, AMANO added color.

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The Pottery Barn catalog cover was a triumph. Buyers knew how important this sale was, but in far-off Honduras it meant much more; security, school uniforms, a new roof, shoes, medicines, even bank accounts.

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Recognizing some of the people responsible for the success of the project: Upper left, Vilma Martinez, ATA office manager; upper right, Ana Carolina, designer, with Marvin Brant, the USAID contact; lower left, Ray Manoff, Project Director with Diana Negroponte, the U.S.Ambassador’s wife; lower right, Romane Brant, volunteer salesperson and hostess to all of ATA in her Valle de Angeles home..

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Other credits: Upper left, Mary and Jim Plaut, founders of Aid to Artisans, in Santa Lucia; Clare Smith, ATA Marketing Manager, in Copan; lower left, AMANO’s warehouse and asembly in Tegucigalpa; lower right, Burges Smith, ATA Treasurer, in Yarumela.

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The real credit goes, of course, to the artisans of Honduras

â“’ copyright Clare Brett Smith 2011

G etti ng to ma r k et i s w ha t artisans most want and also what they most need. It is a challenge to match artisan abilities and products with unfamiliar markets and it’s more and more obvious that design is essential.

Š 2011 Clare Brett Smith