Growing pains

First day in El Sauce, we rode up the mountain to Las Minitas and past to Cerro Colorado, for a meeting of the Fuente de Pino basket-making cooperative.

These are the women who make the baskets out of pine needles that fall near their homes; simple yet intricate functional art with no environmental impact and no cost except time and thread.

Feliciana is going to be away for some time (she's wearing blue and stripes), so the women needed to elect a stand-in vice president to lead the group.

They are learning to run the co-op by themselves, and this meeting was a three-month workshop of looking at the income and costs of the effort.

People were pretty hesitant to step up, but in the end, Yarmilda was elected.