Art Matènwa — haiti handcrafts

This has been a pivotal year for us in terms of our decision to find new ways to market the artists’ products and expand our reach. Our little RaRa storefront in Wellfleet, MA had kept us afloat for years but now we needed to be more than “afloat”... we needed wings. Not being of natural entrepreneurial blood, I asked our board to approve my enrollment in an intensive 5-day “Market Readiness” program in Manhattan given by Aid to Artisans, an established source for artisans world-wide. I emerged from that extraordinary experience grasping what we need to do to grow, and with the fire to do it. Fortunately for us I learned there that people are more and more interested in buying...

Since our return from Haiti this summer I’ve gotten many concerned questions about whether we got the mosquito-borne Chikungunya virus that’s infected so many thousands of people in Haiti. Thanks to the intrepid Arielle Berrick we were so swathed in Deet products that the mosquitos sent out an S.O.S whenever we breezed by. Thus we remained virus-free. Which almost didn’t seem fair. Nearly all of the artists, nearly all of Matenwa, had gone through it. People would laugh a rueful JUST- you-WAIT laugh when we said we’d ducked it so far. The artists were still lethargic and feverish, with ongoing arthritis-like pain in their joints, so we didn’t press them hard, but still we managed to make some fun prototypes...