My first visit to the Artisan groups
WomenCraft has 22 artisan groups, of which I visited 4 today. I am a little jetlagged but eager to get started on my work. The great thing about my work is that they say I can really focus in on what I want to do. It would seem that I have become the resident photo journalist, which means essentially that I get to take photos all day, write up some stories, meet as many artisans as I can and help to build a phenomenal development enterprise. So this is pretty much my dream job, for now at least.
My Swahili is going to need to improve ASAP as not very many people around here speak English. So far I can say hello, my name is…, it is my pleasure to meet you, I am from Canada, and may I take your photo. Not a bad start to work from but I will definitely need an interpreter. Right now we are planning for me to work on a project called the ‘Kanga exchange’ where women in the community can exchange their old kanga or kitenge (the dress commonly worn in the area) for a new one. Womencraft uses the Kitenge and kangas as a decorative element in the baskets that they make. This enables them to incorporate an important element of east African culture into the handcrafts. Women here usually only have about three items of clothing, therefore, one Kitenge has seen considerable amounts of a women’s life and it if could talk it would likely have some pretty interesting stories to tell us. The women will tell us a story about themselves and the Kitenge and the story will be attached to the handcraft product that the gently used and washed Kitenge is a part of. I will be taking their pictures and writing their stories for the label or bookmark that will have the information on it. I also want to put together a section on the website that contains pictures of all of the artisans with a little story about them. People will hopefully be able to look up the identification number on the tag of the product and find out who made their basket. I really like both of these projects because I think that it is a really fun element of buying a fair trade product. Alexandra, one of the volunteers, has been working on new product designs for the last four months so I will be taking photos of the products and writing up descriptions for the website.
There is a lot to do and barely any time to do it in so I will be busy. Have some fun checking out the photos I took in the villages. I had a lot of fun with some of the babies who are little models and loved the camera.
