It's all in the stitching

During the past school year, there was much talk of micro financing and its ups and downs. Often the conversation would discuss the negatives in order to seek improvements, but this often led to an interesting take on crafts cooperatives. They may not be the best source of income and investment, but it is hard to deny that a busy person is much happier than a bored one. There will always be a market for food stuffs, but then again, it is incredibly sensitive to price volatility and weather. Weather is incredibly hard to predict in the grand scheme of things, and when there is a poor harvest, farmers are left with few options. While I don’t think that craft cooperatives will save the lives of everyone who joins them, the co-ops can certainly change the lives of those involved for the better.

Beautiful Butterflies are all over, and the seamstresses are so talented!

During our time in Musanze, the Spark interns have not been shy about making friends, and one of the friends that Dennis and I made on a matatu coming home from Nyabageni introduced us to this small sewing group called Ubushobozi. Had I not seen one of the bags from the group, I probably never would have made my way there, but after that a few of the other interns wanted to go see the small shop. It’s off the beaten path, so when you call ahead, I member of the co-op will come to pick you up in town and walk you to their building. Our whole crew ended up going out that morning to meet and walk over with one of the co-op leaders, and much to my surprise we were met by a pair of muzngus at the designated meeting spot! Turns out that the founder of the co-op, Jeanne, happened to be visiting for a month over her summer break (from teaching in Thailand), and so she was in town to pick us up! The walk was wonderful, and Gale began to tell us the story of how the co-op began and that many of its members are from a Spark community Shingiro (that I wrote about last post). The women were delightfully welcoming and even introduced us yogis back next week for a yoga class with them! I am really hoping that I will be able to take them up on their offer! Ideally, work will allow for a little exercise in the afternoon. The girls that partake in the co-operative are predominantly orphans or heads of households (widows). All are very young and besides learning to sew, they learn English, yoga (with the help of a mass donation of mats and yoga suits), personal finance skills, dancing and for long-term members are beginning to learn more about getting products to proper markets. The colors and scraps of fabric that lay strewn about showed a little bit of the chaos that surrounds the lives of these girls, but with the help of the old pedal butterfly sewing machines, they are learning to copy bags of others and make all manner of things! Currently, Petra (a Czech lady working with Gale in Thailand) is teaching the girls how to quilt together the scraps that come from their current bag making. 

Some of the fine seamstresses!

The girls make traditional cloth purses, baskets, head bands and a few years back even began to make yoga mat bags! This was what spurred the girls interest in learning what this “yoga” was that the muzngus needed long skinny bags for. They were able to get free lessons from an expat living up in Musanze, the mats and suits from her studio back home as a donation. Visiting the co-op was so hope inspiring, and I was so glad to see something that while struggling to take on new members and still sell enough goods was fighting to help more and more people. After we said our good-byes, our team split in a few different directions, but Dennis and Sophia joined me for tea and a stop into the market.

Yep, we are regulars.

We ‘took’ tea at our usual spot with a samosa each did a little reading and then moseyed into the ‘stuff’ market. I wanted to pick-up a few fabrics I had seen in order to take them to Kigali for the weekend to meet with Natasha’s tailor in Kimironko, and Sophia wanted to try to find a pair of jelly-like shoes that women in the villages wear. We hit-up the footwear first, and as we were bargaining, some of the co-operative members walked in to get fabric as well! They did a little extra negotiating for Sophia in Kinyarwanda, which was so sweet! We had already bought things from them, and they could easily have left us to our own negotiating, but instead they helped out. Makes me continue to believe that putting good energy into the world means you get good energy out of it as well. Either way, it was lovely to see them, and I was glad to not have said good-bye forever! After getting the shoes and a quick photo of Sophia and the stall owner, we headed off to get lost in the fabrics of the market. So many exquisite fabrics are there every time, and it just makes me want to wear the African prints every day for the rest of my life. There is so much color and energy in the prints that you can’t help but smiling at them. I can’t help, but think that sadly the longer I am back in the States though the less comfortable it is to wear that much color (it makes you stand out a lot back home, so the inverse relationship tends to lead to much of the clothing going into the closet). 

Passing the mosque after our visit to the co-op.

I am having some pj pants made this time around through, so hopefully that will mean I can wear them relentlessly! While the girls were off shopping for clothing goods, Dennis had slipped of and purchased a belt with Kagame’s face on the buckle and a UNHCR tarp (that he’d been obsessing over for the last week). I wasn’t particularly pleased to see the tarp, but knew there was no changing his mind there…just seems to me like a slap in the face of the UN and the refugees they serve. So much good work is done, and the fact that tarps meant to protect those in need make it into the hands of a relatively well to do American seems a bit twisted. We let it go, and headed home though to work on more survey data entry.

The data entry continued throughout the day, but luckily got broken-up once for a break trying the Venus Passion tea shop (attached to a massage parlor) here in Musanze. The café just opened recently and the owner said there would be a party with free food and drinks. Turns out that the owner told us a day late though, so we showed-up to no one there, and no celebrating! You can imagine our surprise, because with free food and drinks, we were expecting half the town to show-up (or at least all of the muzngu population)! The manager/owner acknowledged his goof-up by having us get free food with the purchase of a drink. We wanted to try the place, so we readily agreed to try it! Two pots of tea and a full African meal later we were full and promising to come back! The place was well decorated with some of that fabulously colorful and elegant fabric, and a not too cramped and crowded feel. We also all tried (those who had never eaten them before) tree tomatoes or Japanese plums. You massage the things almost to death then bite of the bottom (opposite the stem) and suck out the juices, but because some of us were talking and eating, the red juices were found to be dripping on things (in a blood red coloring). They were tasty, though I couldn’t eat significant amounts of them, I would definitely eat one again and recommend people try them if they can get a ripe one! After we wrapped things up, we all headed back to the house/office to get some more data entered before our dinner guests for the evening arrived!

Our Spark team was all hands on deck preparing for our evening’s guests from the Dragons group (high school students- juniors mostly- here in Rwanda for a month to do homestays and learn about the development of Rwanda). Our house girl was busy cooking with another lady outside while Dennis and Aime dug a fire pit, Emily and Sarah cut-up 4 pineapples, Natasha and Sasha put out pillows and fabric for people to sit outside on, and I ran around with flashlights and candles (because naturally the power went out about the time it began getting dark). The table was completely set-up when the kids arrived, and we got straight to business- dinner. It was delicious, though did leave the house an incredible mess! Luckily, the water had come back on, so our toilettes began flushing again without too much work!

Dennis and Aime's fire pit!

The group of students was an interesting mix, many were from well off backgrounds, but there were a few that caught my attention and held me in discussions. Early on, I sat next to a pair of kids that had a hard time describing why they were there, and that came as a bit of a surprise to me. Generally, expats here have a distinctive reason for coming- missions, do-gooders, adventurers, break from the daily grind, you name it, but there is always a reason. As the conversation moved away from small talk to development topics, those slipped away from our corner, and a few others came into the circle. We were predominantly focusing conversation on different development models, but it was interesting to hear the take of these optimistic high-schoolers, and also to hear their questions. I am sure that there were some questions that were not so satisfactorily answered, but we definitely all did our best. From comparing and contrasting the development of Rwanda to other countries nearby to explaining the complicated history of the great lakes region of Africa, we covered a lot of topics from revisiting the importance of privacy to how you can create development from within rather than a using a scaled model from the outside. Sasha (the leader of Spark and momma hen for the summer) wanted to develop the ‘Spark Model’ in order to show development differently than the large NGOs already working on the ground here in Rwanda. She is die-hard supportive of the ideas for what needs to happen next coming from the community itself, not from outside organizations. I think it is definitely critical, but also understand that the flip side of that coin shows that sometimes communities don’t know what might help most in the long-term. Foresight is incredibly hard when you are struggling to keep your family alive today, and if you need to pay school fees today or buy medicine for a sick child, your priorities may not be those which are going to develop your community as a whole. Knowing when and where individual priorities come into the development process is hard, and without community involvement will go entirely misrepresented. However, if these personal interests are over-represented, then equally negative things can occur and can cause stagnation in the development process. 

The trade-offs are numerous, and there is no correct answer. There are merely solutions to problems that have intended and unintended consequences (not all of which can ever be foreseen). Spark tries to work with ‘clean’ communities, those who have never worked with NGOs before, and while this excludes a large number of communities, it also goes to the heart of Spark. It is much harder to prevent aid dependency when you give aid alone, and don’t ask for anything in return. Now with Spark’s grants, you might think that is exactly what is happening, but it is not exactly the case. In order to get a Spark grant, communities must provide labor toward their project’s implementation and an extremely long planning process before they can receive a grant. They also must be able to put together a solid grant proposal. I just hope that through all of the work Spark does, they are able to teach communities to fish not just giving them a fish. Giving money is a challenge, if it never needs to be repaid it is hard to follow those funds. We just want Spark to help these communitites to work together to solve their own problems one by one. The reason for our grants staying relatively small is that the communities can perhaps find this or raise this much money from within the project community. IF the grants were larger, then the community would not know how to prioritize funding or work together to cover costs that over reach the given budget for a year. Trying to make these projects manageable for a community that is willing to work together can help build the trust for future projects to be funded within the community itself.

These conversations continued into the night as I met an Emory prospective student and more of the students rotated in and out of the conversations. As the night wound down, the students headed back to their hotel, and our team started roasting bananas with chocolate chips stabbed into them on kabob sticks. I headed to bed shortly thereafter since Aime, Dennis and I had to be up at 5 to make our way down south for a two meeting day at Bukamero and Ruhango. Getting some rest is easier said than done with so much giggling by the campfire, but it was also important for professionalisms sake, and the next morning showed who’d stayed up a little too late quite clearly!