The making of a beautiful quilt
Life Changing Experience
The women and men of Southeast Asia live and work in hard conditions. Both can be found bent over in the fields of rice, standing on ladders stretching to pick the coffee beans or fishing in boats made of reeds from sunup to sundown. Their indomitable spirit carries them through but it is a hard life. It isn’t just the parents that suffer but the children as well. With parents gone all day and exhausted when they return at night, the children are left to their own devices, school is but one option.
Co Ten was one of these women of the fields until she moved to the city with her husband. It was a new world, filled with opportunity and free time that she filled in part by quilting – a long time passion. The thought of her friends in the fields back home sparked an idea: why not teach them to quilt and sell the finished product to people in the city? She returned to her village and found five women who wanted to learn a few patterns and designs that she had developed. Co Ten was right, the quilts sold well and demand grew. As it expanded, the business established itself as a non-profit entity. The quilts are sold through three storefronts in the region. The initial group of five quilters turned into 310 over the past ten years now in villages throughout Southeast Asia.
After taking the children to school, the village women gather in one of their homes to begin quilting for the day. Quilts are made entirely by hand with each woman combining colors and prints to make each quilt truly unique. Each village is part of a region managed by a women who hands out the assignments, oversees the process, orders sufficient materials, checks the quality of each quilt, packages and sends the finished quilts to the production facility. She collects the money for her region and pays the women according to how many quilts they produce. The non-profit takes administrative costs and overhead for the stores but returns the bulk of the money to the quilters. Some of the proceeds go to improving the lives of the villagers by supporting schools, community facilities and agricultural improvements as well.
Most importantly, the family life of the quilters has changed significantly. The children are walked to school in the morning, meet their mothers for lunch, go back to class afterwards and come back to the quilting women when school is finished. This opportunity has been a life-changing experience for everyone involved.
indoTreasures is a for-profit organization doing business with a non-profit in Southeast Asia.