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OUR STORY
Janice Ashby
FounderIt was 1998 and I was visiting Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe.
In the hotel gift shop my eyes were drawn immediately to a photo album made from a combination of stunning handmade papers. Having worked with handmade papers recently and now immodestly considering myself a bit of an expert, I found I could not identify where they came from and was amazed when they turned out to have been locally made. As Africa was not a region known for paper-making I was bursting with curiosity.
I located the paper-maker who it turned out had pioneered paper-making as a cottage industry several years before, and we started to work together. Local crafters made up my designs and I brought them back to the U.S. for sale.
This is when my love affair with Zimbabwe and its peoples really began. As I began to spend more time there I went on to discover that it was home to a huge population of artistic people. They carve wood and stone. They spin colorful sisal twine and make baskets and bags. They are known all over the world for their giant stone sculptures. Zimbabwe wire artists too are world renowned.
I had spent many years as a graphic designer running a design firm in South Africa and had moved on to New York in the eighties. I developed a passion for handmade paper and began designing paper products from my home in Manhattan. Then I discovered Zimbabwe.
It was all quite small in the beginning and as I worked with the women I got to know them well. It was a struggle for us all to make ends meet but we were growing and providing work for more and more women
I saw how artists and artisans struggled to care for their families including having to take care of unemployed relatives and extended families too. I longed to be in the position to bring more women into our communities to learn the skills of paper-crafting and to watch it make a difference in more peoples lives.
Then one day in 2003 we got our proverbial big break. A large U.S. based crafting company gave us a huge order. This was the chance we had been waiting for. I set forth for Zimbabwe to set up our own organization and provide work to literally hundreds of women.
To my joy we found a home for our work-shops in two under-utilized church halls on a lovely old but still working mission station complete with a small red-brick church, a tiny school and a day care center.
It is situated in a rural setting among granite boulders and shaded by purple jacarandas and scarlet flame trees. It was perfect!
Nearby was a densely populated township, home to hundreds of thousands of people, mostly unemployed and poor. With the help of the enthusiastic chairman of the parish council to spread the word, women started to pour into the mission.
We showed them how to make the products and and how to package them up...
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for shipment. In my previous life I had been a package designer and now I had a field day designing not only the products but the packaging too. I was in my element.
Other crafting women living far away from our campus were benefiting too. We needed sisal twine in large quantities so we travelled to the hills around Masvingo where the women spin twine from the silky fibers of the wild spiky sisal plants and dye them bright colors with flower petals, leaves from peach trees and wild shrubs.
A wood artist invented imitation porcupine quills to save us from having to hunt down real porcupines whose quills had previously been used as decorations. This group works off campus as do our quarry artists who supply us with tiny stone carvings. Our driver in our bumpy pickup truck collects the work and brings it all back to the mission, or it arrived in bundles on the tops of buses.
There were now over four hundred women, (and a handful of men) involved in Eco Africa-related work. After the first big order I found other customers around the world who love our artisans’ work. But there were ominous clouds on the horizon. Around the time we started our own crafting workshops the economic situation in Zimbabwe took a serious turn for the worse. Owing to political turmoil the food supply was ruined. Zimbabwe had previously been known as the bread-basket of Africa and there was always food even for poor people. Now the country has to rely on food aid programs from outside.
The previously excellent school system started breaking down as teachers fled across the borders because they were not being paid, and there was no money for school books. School fees shot up to beyond what poor families could afford to pay.
There were funerals weekly for AIDS victims. Women were coming in with tummy aches from drinking contaminated water as the purification chemicals ran out and were not replaced. Husbands were also fleeing to neighboring countries to find work and only sometimes sending money back to their families. More and more women were having to cope with their children on their own.
The challenges facing the women artisans were enormous and I could only look on helplessly. Free lunches were obviously just a band-aid in comparison to all the other life threatening issues they were facing.
Something had to be done. I had an idea.
I would start a non profit in the U.S. to raise money for the essential basic necessities of life needed by our artisans. We would fund a a water purification system, food packages for home, improvements for the school on the campus, scholarships for children, equipment and school books, day care for our artisans' toddlers, health advice, whatever it would take to help our women live more healthy and fulfilling lives.
Back in New York friends, volunteers and supporters rallied round.
In 2007 Eco Africa Social Ventures Inc. was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non profit organization.
Now it can be your opportunity to help. Please do.
- I am Lizzie and my mother is a paper-crafter.
I take care of my baby brother while my mother is at work....