Making paper by hand involves many secrets, and one of the most surprising is... (promise not to tell...) OKRA!! You have to add the slimy stuff that seeps out of each juicy green fruit to the vat of water and fiber. This okra stuff makes the water “thicker” so that each little delicate fiber has more time to settle onto the surface of the papermaking mold, making a smooth and even sheet. I’m telling you, it doesn’t work without okra! Procuring okra, however, has proven to be a bit of a bottle neck in our papermaking on Ataúro: it is not grown here (yet) and can only be bought at the grocery store, Kmanek, in Dili (when they have it) and without full time refrigeration, the fresh okra goes real bad, real fast.
But! We found a solution! If we slice open each okra fruit and dry them immediately, we can seep them in some freshly boiled water whenever we need, and they reconstitute and start oozing their gold. Then another hurdle arose: with the humidity and some days of solid cloud cover, we had a problem drying them before they started molding! Mana Katarina came to the rescue (again) with a(nother) brilliant idea to put them up on the tin roof over the kitchen that goes from 0 to baking with the slightest hint of sun. And so, one of our main bottlenecks has turned into more of a jar-mouth.
With the access to ample okra juice (hence forth “formation aid” to turn to papermaking speak) we learned pulp painting! We tried out base sheets made with a mix of kapok and snake plant (named “samodok” courtesy Mana Maturina, because we were tired of not having a name for it in Tetun and “samea” means snake in Tetun, so... samodok!) and pulp painted designs with finely beaten red canna lilly. We used a water bottle with a hole pierced in the top to squirt the canna lilly pulp mixed with lots of formation aid into stencils or simply onto the base sheets to make shadowy effects. Everyone was really happy with the results! We’ll be making books out of some of these new designs.
And I’m very proud to introduce a new member of the team; Maun João, has joined us this past week, working tirelessly decorticating snake plant, pineapple leaves, and canna lilly stems, beating kapok and snake plant fibers, and making lots of sheets of paper. His receptive, sensitive, hard-working nature is a great addition to the team! (I think we’ve also hooked another young person, Maun Cristobal, but he is still in high school, so the team will have to wait!)
