Ancient Operations

Our activities for today were very focused on getting into the community and understanding how individuals make money and are able to sustain themselves and their family. Both practices were based on traditional and simplistic techniques that allow for cheap and profitable operations. We started by going to a woodworking workshop and watched as an elderly man expertly cut different colours of wood into perfectly detailed wooden pieces. The colours simply come from three wood types that he uses, and if the colour he needs isn't within those natural colours, he submerges them in the water in which rice is grown. Strangely enough, each wood colour changes to another colour on the spectrum, and he can even adjust the brightness of the colour by changing how long it stays submerged. It is incredible how resourceful and knowledgeable these people are. If you look at the photos, you will understand how much variation of colour there is, and there is nothing but rice water used to change it. Not to mention the amount of detail that is present within the pieces of artwork and it is simply created using a small piece of wire that's had a hammer taken to it to create the teeth of the blade, a base of metal to move the wood around, and a spring and a handle to move the blade up and a down. He simply draws the shape, cuts it, puts glue on the pieces, and hammers them into position. After a quick sanding, it becomes smooth and gives the appearance that it was done with a laser. The accuracy and detail is incredible. No painting, no precision tools, just experience and wood. After showing off some of his finer works, we went to the gift to peruse the other pieces available to buy.

After this, we moved on the scarf making workshop. This was run by a bunch of women within the local community and is an incredibly painstaking, traditional, coordinated, but perfected process of extracting the silk, threading it, and weaving it. The ladies were clearly experts, but it was hard to capture the processes in photos. I have videos I will attach, but I can only add 2, and it's hard to capture the full procedure with just 2. In summary, you start by soaking and cooking the silk pods, drying them, and then extracting the thread by spinning it around a little instrument that combines them together to get a thread of a predetermined thickness. Then, the thread is spun through another machine to ensure that no knots will occur. Then, they run it through a vertical spindle before the final step of going into the horizontal spindle where the scarf can be created. This works the same as a regular sowing machine but manual and slow instead of automated. But it was cool to get an understanding of how the process works normally. Once again, the tour ended by going through the gift shop to purchase anything that tickled our fancy and support the local woman. This was it for our day as we then continued on our drive to Antsirabe and called it a day.Read more