1In a valley two days' walk from the nearest road, I watched an elder weave patterns her grandmother had taught her.
2She told me, through a translator, that none of her granddaughters wanted to learn the craft any longer.
3The younger generation had moved to the coast, where smartphones and salaries promised a more forgiving kind of life.
4Our guide insisted that tourism was saving the village, yet the woven cloths in the market were made by machines.
5Visitors like me arrive searching for authenticity, and our very presence quietly reshapes the thing we came to find.
6The village now performs its harvest ceremony twice daily, at ten and at four, according to the tour schedule.
7Whether a ritual repeated for paying audiences twice a day remains a ritual is a question I still cannot answer.
8Perhaps preservation and change are not enemies, and every generation has always negotiated its own version of tradition.
9Before I left, the elder sold me a small cloth and asked me to remember where it came from.
10It hangs above my desk now, less a souvenir than an uncomfortable question I carry home with me.