I followed up with a theater related lead to see if that contact knew any puppeteers. On the phone, he said that he did not and that what he did was to get oppressed people to tell their own stories through theater. This sounded pretty good to me. I said great. Then I asked that if I find any puppeteers, if they would be interested in giving them a short training as they too are theater artists who could benefit from their experience. I tried to finish this one sentence about three times, but was cut off each time by an insistent repeat of “what we do is…” I said ok and hung up, then scratched that name off my list until the page ripped.This is how these puppeteers fell through the cracks. No one cared enough to provide new resources and training. Those who receive funding and are in a position to do so, could not care about anything beyond what gets them funding. I thought to myself, I’m not a puppeteer, but regardless of what I am not, I hope not to be like some of the people I have encountered either.During my search thus far, I have encountered many friendly people who had not thought about doing work with these puppeteers before, but once I brought it up, were interested in seeing how they could be brought to different institutions for performances which could benefit them. Unfortunately, I have also run into people who asked me blankly, why I would even want to work with them, or others still who narrow the scope of their art to “helping” people that they can eat foreign funding on.It is these very people who make it difficult for our culture to survive. They are gatekeepers to culture, who swallow all that they can on the basis of this culture, while giving a pittance or completely cutting out the real practitioners of these art forms. This search is challenging and often feels unrewarding, but I do think that it is important. I don’t know exactly what I will find and to what degree the skills are intact once I reach these puppeteers, but the anger I feel at the apathy of these “gatekeepers” is only helping to push me that much harder to do this.In the evening, Suffi sahib and I visited a friend who is doing some good work running a school for children in the area. Invariably, there are ideas and often leads for me to follow up on that come up in these conversations with different people. We went for a meal afterwards, and I enjoyed these little slippers with fish eyes and the toy store next to it.