Our future

The bad news is that the SHONA women are homeless again. Almost.

The good news is that we have a plan.

But we need your help.

We need to build a small workshop right away. The SHONA women are being forced to leave their current home and workshop within the next week. I know, I know, they just moved into that space. And they loved it. But this is the problem with renting in Goma. The landlord decided he wanted to build a hotel there and told them they need to leave "tomorrow!!"

Without your help they will have no where to work.

But you can play a huge part in our future by helping us build a workshop. You can put a roof of their heads, literally. You can buy the wood that will build the walls. Or the door that will keep them safe.

Here is the great news: this workshop will stand for years to come. It will be built on land that the SHONA woman have already purchased, through the work of their own hands. It is a small piece of land, but they bought it themselves. It will be a humble workshop, but one we have built ourselves.

100% of your donation will be used to cover the construction costs are listed here.

Sometimes we have to stand for the things we believe in.

If you like what we do. If you believe in the SHONA women

Please support their future.
Check it out here.

A Little Shorter

" Tuko na problem"
"we have a problem.

You can imagine the sinking feeling in my stomach, when Mapendo started out the conversation this way the other day. She went on to say...

"We think you made a mistake. Remember how you told us to shorten those wrap skirts? We tried to shorten them, but it just won't work! They are already so short! I tried one on..."

At this point Mapendo burst out into embarrassed giggles as she recalled the scandalous length of our summer wrap skirts. The ladies were sewing knee-length wrap skirts for the summer, but every time I thought we had agreed on a nice, summery knee-length, the skirts started creeping a little longer. Inch by inch, they were becoming more like 3/4 length skirts.

It reminded me of the teenage girls on the subways in New York, heading off to Catholic school in their plaid skirts. Every time you glance back at those girls those little plaid skirts seem to get shorter and shorter. They do it so gradually it is hard to be sure. But I am guessing when those girls walk out of the house in the morning, those skirts look quite modest, and by the time they are well into their afternoon commute, the skirts have become nothing short of scandalous.

The SHONA ladies, who are barely more than teenagers themselves, are fighting that same battle. Except in the opposite direction. And on your behalf. Although I have explained to them that a knee-length skirt is still quite modest in this country, the women are concerned about your reputations and eager to cover up those knees a little bit more!

At any rate, after serious promises that our skirts were by-no-means considered short in this society, I extracted a promise that the ladies would resist the urge to add an inch or two here or there. So come and check out our collection of "summer length" skirts and wraps. They really are great for the warmer weather, and we're pretty sure that, thanks to Mapendo, your knees won't be too scandalized.

A New Documentary

Teaching English to adults here in Brooklyn, I work with mostly Spanish speaking immigrants. Then I go home and call the SHONA women in Goma. The transition from Spanish to Swahili, can be a bit confusing sometimes. In the past year, I think Argentine and Mapendo have heard me increasingly throwing in words like "bueno", in the midst of a sentence in Swahili. It never seems to throw them though. Congo, if nothing else, is a country quite comfortable with mixing languages, even unfamiliar ones.

But mostly I find the connection between my students here and the women in Congo surprisingly close. They're all trying to find a way to build a better life. For themselves and for their families. I suppose that is what we are all doing. They've left their homes, their comfort zones, and each step forward also poses a new question.

Which is why I am looking forward to watching the new documentary on PBS tomorrow night.

It is called "Pushing the Elephant" and it follows the story of a Congolese refugee, a woman who fled to the US with 9 of her 10 children. It follows her story years later, caught between here and there. Moreover it follows her story as she is reunited with the daughter who was left behind.

It seems to me that all of our lives are part of this struggle. This struggle to merge the past with the future and come out with a world that we can live in.

Pushing the Elephant was made by a program called Women Making Movies. I haven't seen it yet myself, and from the trailer I can see that there are difficult political and ethnic questions bubbling under the surface. But it poses an interesting question and I will definitely be tuning in.

Check it out Tuesday night, March 29th, on Independent Lens on PBS.

Our Wholesale Order

As some of you may have noticed, I seem to have disappeared.

Sorry about that. I have not actually so much disappeared as I have been trapped in my house, literally. There have been so many boxes, as we have been assembling our first large wholesale order, that I could barely see my way out of the apartment.

But finally we have been able to ship the boxes on to our wholesale customer, and that is who I would like to introduce right here.

Check out www.globalgirlfriend.com and you will find an online, fair trade store. The store was started in 2003 by a woman named Stacey Edgar. It sells fair trade items made by women around the world and is a great way to support small projects with all kinds of different purchases.

I must admit I am a cynic. People often mistake me for an optimist because I do things like start SHONA, with nothing but what appears to be blind hope.

But actually, when it comes to "do-gooder" operations I am often the biggest cynic of them all. I have seen a lot of programs that don't do what they promise to do, and a lot of broad claims about changing the world that translate into something else entirely on the ground.

So I am happy to recommend Global Girlfriend to you. They started as a one woman project, and have grown to over a million dollar enterprise. Yet still they are interested in working with us, as tiny as we might be. In fact Stacey Edgar herself has more or less bent over backwards to work with us, to help support us.

So check out their website and buy something that truly does support women around the globe. Or buy Stacey's new book which even has a small section on Argentine (check out the beginning of chapter 2, to see Argentine make her print debut!)


And send our many thanks to the people at Global Girlfriend for taking a chance on small group of women in Eastern Congo!

Shipping update

As you may recall we are waiting (anxiously) for our shipments from Congo. They were sent by US priority mail a month and a half ago and are somewhere in transit, caught up in the new "homeland security" regulations fiasco.

Today I received a message that went something like this. "Your shipment arrived in Germany ( a halfway transit point). Then it went back to Africa."

Of course the message was in Swahili so we may be missing some of the nuances here.

But somehow I get the general sense that we are not moving in the right direction here. Grrrrr...

And the great irony here, is that I think it really isn't Congo's fault. Or even Africa's fault. Of all the countless things that could go wrong when shipping from Congo, as far as I can tell, none of those has happened. It seems the packages arrived perfectly fine in Europe, as they were supposed to. No one ate them along the way, no wars broke out and stranded them. No, no...in the end we are foiled not by the whims of Africa but by the United States. The only problem is that the US has decided to make it ridiculously hard to ship packages by plane. For fear of one blowing up. So Germany didn't want to take our packages, not because of where they come from, but because of where they are going. It is just to dang hard to ship to the US right now.

Now I am all for security. And I am always scared on airplanes, so I support anything that makes them safer. But it does appear that we have a tendency to base our whole regulatory procedures upon whatever the latest bomb scare was. And unfortunately for us the latest scare was a cargo package.

So now our packages sit in Ethiopia awaiting some solution. We really do need these packages to arrive. And we also need a shipping system that we can continue to rely on. Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers.

Shipping Nightmares

Have you wondered what we are up to?

Admittedly, our shelves are getting a bit bare. (But we still have some great stuff. Check it out!) And perhaps you have been wondering if we at SHONA have simply decided to take an extended vacation.

Perhaps we are on a beach somewhere?

But no, the ladies sewing machines are still whirling and have been for quite some time. And I am still here, in New York, teaching ESL and keeping up with SHONA from this end.

For the past 4-5 months we have been working on a wholesale order for a fair trade website (more on them soon!) They ordered hundreds of skirts, dresses and tote bags. WOW. We're small and to us that is a plenty big order.

It has been quite an adventure, our foray into this type of wholesale order. Fortunately our customer is extremely wonderful, and has bent over backwards to work with us. And the sewing has gone along fine, it is all the other logistics that are slightly nerve wracking. Ok, very nerve-wracking. Our order is finally finished and in transit.

Which could be a good thing.

Or a bad thing.

We ship from Congo to the US through the international arm of the US priority mail. We've been using them for years and we haven't had any problems. But of course the problems start now.

You remember that bomb scare on the passenger plane in November? After that, the US put in increased regulations covering all packages coming into the US by air. That's us. I don't even know how one would go about shipping a package from Congo by boat, but I have the distinct impression it would be difficult. So we count on airplanes to carry our packages to the US.

And our packages appear to be sitting around, somewhere between here and there, waiting for clearance to board a plane and enter the US. Or perhaps at this point they are waiting in line at customs in the US. That would be nice.

But the most nerve-wracking thing is that we just don't know exactly where the packages are.

The tracking numbers from Congo don't work. They never have with any of our packages. I've been on the phone with the boss in Congo, who generously called Europe to try and locate our packages. He assures me that our packages boarded a plane from Europe to the US last week and are probably stuck at customs now.

But then again, what would he say if they had lost our packages? Or if someone had eaten them? Probably the same thing. We have found this shipping service to be extremely reliable and professional and they have never yet disappeared one of our packages. And we can see in many online forums that many, many people who are trying to ship by air into the US are experiencing the same delay as us with the US postal service. So we are somewhat comforted.

But in the end, shipping from Congo to the US has always seemed somewhat miraculous to us. There are indeed so many things that could go wrong.

So please keep us in your thoughts and prayers as we (very!) anxiously await our packages, which contain not only our wholesale order, but also our new stock for our online store. And keep in mind that as we hold our breath and wait for this wholesale order to finally be finished (and paid) it is your purchases that keep us going. We're sorry we don't have more on our shelves. It's not because we haven't been working, or because we have forgotten our faithful customers. And in fact come check us out. There is still plenty on our shelves, and small donations to help us buy cloth are always very welcome as well. It is each little purchase and donation, that keep us going. Truly.

What we do is small but it is extremely real to the craftswomen and their families. Thank you for your support!

Black History Month and African Clothes

"Memories of our lives, of our works and our deeds will continue in others."
Rosa Parks



What do black history month and the SHONA women have in common?

Quite a lot actually.

While living in Congo, and working with the SHONA women I taught them about Harriet Jacobs. We talked about this courageous young slave woman, who ran away from her "master" and hid in a crawl space above a house for 7 years. She hid in a space where she could not stand upright, literally depriving herself of the ability to stand or walk.

The SHONA women too have been deprived of the ability to stand and walk. For Argentine, Riziki, and Solange growing up with polio meant that they could only crawl. Today, finally, with the help of the handicapped center in Goma, they can stand with metal braces and crutches. But for a long time that was impossible.

They have also all had the experience of hiding. Growing up in the midst of war zones, and even today when they return to visit their families in rural areas, they are only too accustomed to the sound of gun-shots, the bolting of doors, and the hunkering down.

Harriet Jacobs' story resonated with the SHONA women.

But perhaps what struck the SHONA women most was the book itself. I showed them Harriet Jacobs' book, with her own words inside. Harriet Jacobs came out of slavery to write her own story. You could see the glimmer in the ladies eyes as they passed their hands over the cover.

Sometimes, as an American living abroad I have deeply regretted so much of the American "example" to the world...the war in Iraq, the corporate greed, the growing gap between rich and poor...

And surely slavery is one of those terrible examples. But I am thankful for the countless African-American lives who have reclaimed that story, and turned it into one of struggle and triumph. Surely those many African American voices are some of America's greatest strengths.

I am thankful for black history month. For the opportunity it gives to reflect on the struggles that have been fought over generations, and the powerful voices that have been forged in the midst of those struggles.

If you wear African clothing as part of your celebrations, or simply as part of your life, would you consider wearing clothing sewn by the SHONA women, women who are still struggling to find a way to make their voices heard, but who definitely have a story to tell. Your purchases make a huge difference to them.