Finger puppet quiz

I walked into the Manos Amigas warehouse one day and saw a couple of giant bags of finger puppets waiting to be shipped to Ten Thousand Villages. I wondered how many shops are supplied by this order, and for what period of time. It seemed like a ton of puppets! 


Two points if you can guess how many finger puppets are in the two bags in this top picture...

If you guessed over ten thousand finger puppets, then two points are yours!


The puppets are colorful, fun, and detailed. And yet, Christina said, the women who knit them do so quickly, in a matter of several minutes per puppet. Being the slowest knitter on the planet makes me marvel at the miracle of being able to produce something cool so quickly. 

The group that knits these puppets is called Manos Aymaras, and they are a collective of women that live in Puno, near the border of Bolivia, on a gorgeous lake at 12,500 feet of elevation. The women keep yarn looped around their necks and they knit while they walk, while they sell their family’s vegetables and wool at market, whenever they have a free moment. It’s apparently something they can do without thinking! And, a part of the story I love the most: their husbands do the detail work at home in the evenings.