Rhonda is a 40 year old Canadian woman who has been living in Cebu for roughly ten years. She originally came to the Philippines doing mission work and eventually decided to stick around and minister to street children. A few years ago, after witnessing the multitude of garbage tossed into the sides of the street and burned nightly, she was inspired to find a sustainable alternative. She decided to start cleaning and collecting juice boxes and sew them together to make bags. Today, her bag making handicraft has grown into it's own small cottage industry. She has hired around ten sewers who operate as private contractors. They each come in to demonstrate their ability to using a sewing machine (they are all operating on Singer sewing machines that are AT LEAST 50 years old) and once they pass the training are sent out to collect their own juice boxes, clean them as directed and sew them into bags she has designed. She then sells them across the world for 100-500 pesos (2-10$) and the profits all go straight back to the craftspeople. Rhonda givers her sewers a sense of privatized business in that she sets the standard in terms of bag design, juice box cleaning process and stitching and lets them produce as many or as few as they feel fit.
On our first stop we went to her workshop, a nice and fairly large building where she keeps all the bags and has other magnets and jewelry on display. Hilary and David picked up an order of nearly 100 bags to take back to the US with them for their fundraising tour. They always sell out. We got to see some of the women working on the ancient sewing machines and couldn't believe that they were able to produce the quantity and quality that they do with such a decrepit instrument. Rhonda has been able to market to a plethora of churches in both the US and Canada and often times ships out orders of 500 or even 10,000 bags. Her story is the true success that can come from micro-financed cottage industries.
After getting to see her shop we all hopped in the pick up truck and drove about 10 mins down the road to the graveyard neighborhood. At first glance it looked like any other shanty town her in Cebu; kids playing, women washing clothes and a maze of windy alleys swarmed with stray dogs trying to stay cool in the shade. We got to meet some of them sewers and see how there work has supported entire families.
As we ventured further back into the neighborhood we finally came upon the actually graveyard. In Cebu, graves are above ground (see photos) and can be rented by families for five years. After the five years are up the family must come and claim the bones or they are just thrown out into the graveyard while the grave is cleared out for a new body. I thought it would be creepy and daunting but the multitude of children and goats running around the graveyard dispelled any fear I had. Naturally, the Filipino people decided to take these massive concrete graves and use them as walls for there houses, tables for eating, or stoops for hanging laundry. The graveyard is no more sacred than any other overcrowded neighborhood in the city. It serves as the base for homes, karaoke machines, loud music and crying babies.
Walking out from the windy and smelly alleyways of the graveyard we came upon a gorgeous yellow house adorned with dark mahogany and three stories. Adjacent to this beautiful home was a muddy, dirty strip of land hosting four of five huts full of people, roosters dogs and your general poor families. This it completely normal here; the dead, the poor and the rich all within a rocks throw of eachother.
No comments:
Post a Comment