I went to visit a Fair Trade business called The Association for Craft Producers today in Kathmandu. It was a company set up by an ex-government official named Mira. In 1984, frustrated by government work for craft development, she wanted to start her own private Fair trade Company to employ people. Now they employ over 1200 craft workers and turn over around one and a half million annually! Their biggest client is 10,000 villages.
I was interested to see how they set up the company and how they dealt with some of the issues we face at Citta’s Bhaktipur Women’s center. I learned a lot from the tour about their structure. I was hoping to ask them whether they had any unused applicants for a production woman. We really need someone badly for that position. At the end of the tour I found the manager alone and pulled her aside to ask. The women looked at me confrontationally and said, “no, we are looking for one too”. I guess she may have felt I was there to headhunt.
After visiting the Association for craft producers, I jumped on the back of a motorbike with Wanda’s assistant Raju. Raju is a master weaver and belongs to a school in Lalitpur called the Nepal Srijanatmak Kalaghuti. The founder of this weaving school was an elderly Nepali woman named Urmila. She lives half the year in Canada and the other half in Kathmandu. On the upper floor of the building there was large room that functioned as an office/ atelier for Ms. Urmila. There were two old couches lining the corner of the room near the windows. I was on one, and Urmila on the other. Across the room was a large half-done weaving in silk of the standing Buddha. The loom was quite tall and rose half way to the ceiling. A young, fragile girl sitting cross-legged in front of the weaving was busily tying away the varied golden naturally-dyed silk threads on the lower portion of Buddha’s robe.
Urmila was not hesitant to spill her life story. It was one of those grand stories that unfolded through a never ending soft smile. All her memories had clean edges and where slightly elevated to just below mythic. She told me she was one of the youngest girls to be sent to the Gandhi Cotton weaving houses. Her and six or seven of her girlfriends (accompanied always by one male, of course) would take their long weekends and travel to different parts of India. Urmila and her friends would be a guest of another Gandhi weaving center and food and lodging was not a problem. They would come up with an excuse every weekend away saying that they were sick with a fever or some common illness to extend their stay another day or so. She said this was an exciting way to see most of the country at a time when people didn’t travel as much. After that it was the Beaux Arts in Paris, New York working at a weaving house, and separating her time between Edmonton Canada and Kathmandu at the weaving center. She hesitated after telling me the New York portion of her story. She strained to remember where in New York it actually was. Eventually, lemongrass tea was brought to the table and Urmila sent the young student to fetch her address book to recall where it was in New York she was working. The address book showed up and even that had a story about it. She paused and said “this book was begun in 1963”. I, of course, was able to add to the story that that was before I was born. She found the address on 23rd street and put her mind to rest.
After tea I was given a tour of the center. The weaving looms, students and the dye house were fascinating. The center grew its own Silk-worm farm and the cocoons were stored in giant jars to be sorted before use. The natural dye selections of Onion, pomegranate, tea, ect. were incredible! I made a deal with the school to do small dye batches for our women’s cooperative in Bhaktipur and eventually help set up and train our women to have our own dye house in the center.
