JESSE GREIST: Being somebody who travels all the time, I like to be able to take my music with me, and living and working in places like India and the western parts of Africa, here in Central America, I've had many opportunities to work with native musicians, indigenous musicians, and then also just folk musicians.

We have roughly 10 months out of the year that is rainy. We have about two to two-and-a-half months of dry season, and the rest is sort of moderate rains, rainy season to heavy rainy season. We're just coming out of the rainy season right now. All of October, it was pretty much. We had three weeks where it rained every day, all day long, day and night, and the hard thing for me here, the hardships I faced are that I don't own a vehicle, so that everywhere I go I have to walk, so giant-sized garbage bags have become my best friend in terms of protecting my guitar, my drum, my didgeridoo.

The other thing that I have done, and this is just honestly, I've strategically found places all over Monteverde to leave my instruments. If I'm going to play at a restaurant, if I'm going to play a gig out on a restaurant on a Saturday, oftentimes on a Thursday, if there's a dry spell, I'll bring my instruments in and leave at that restaurant until the Saturday gig, so it involves a lot of forethought here because, you know, take advantage of those half-hour breaks in the rain and, you know, run my instruments to one place and leave them there for a while.

GRETCHEN HASSE: It also involves lot of trust in people too.

JESSE GREIST: Yes. Yeah, definitely. The owners of different restaurants and then my friends, I'll leave things here at the school, locked in the office, and then, you know, at my house so it's almost like I've set up a series of camps all around the town where I can leave my stuff. A lot of musicians here keep dehumidifiers in their houses. Those are very expensive. I have not been able to afford one yet, but that's another thing that people do. My sort of blue collar, if you will, dehumidifier has been the reading lamps that I keep in my house. With the didgeridoo, with the stringed instruments, and especially with the drum (we'll talk about that in just a second), the reading lamps that I have have been indispensable. I keep them underneath the reading lamps all day long and that tends to help with the battle against mold and moisture.

GRETCHEN HASSE: Is mold the -- Have you mentioned warping might be a problem or I mean? I don't know.

JESSE GREIST: I haven't had a problem with warping mostly because the wooden instruments that I have are very thick. My guitar is a solid top and it's, I want to guess, it's probably about, again, a quarter of an inch thick wood. It's thicker than a lot of guitars so I haven't had problems with that. This didgeridoo, I mean it could double as a weapon on the street if I needed it to because it's probably about -- I would say it's probably about 6 pounds. It's very thick wood so warping is not a problem. I have had a bamboo didgeridoo in the past that in rapid climate changes has had trouble with splitting. I don't think that's going to be a problem with this teak wood than if someone had a bamboo didgeridoo, which a lot of them, around here, a lot of didgeridoos that are made in the zone, in the area, are bamboo, and I can imagine problems with splitting there.