First puppets from Toul Sambo

Yesterday, the trainers went out to the community armed with plastic eyes, tapestry needles and coloured thread. Each knitter got to make up one or more of their finished puppets to keep for themselves or their children. I went this morning and some of them were wonderful! See photos below:

Finally for Lena: your knitter, Touch Chayron with her first monkey.

Ven Thy and Chan Thyda.

Soy Srey Neang.

Sin Soeun and Noun Soka.

Krouch Koun, and the best monkey of the lot.

Our champion knitter, Ven Vireak.

All this is very good as we have a handful of orders for Christmas and will need more knitters soon. Hopefully, we get more orders to we can keep purchasing from the TS knitters and keep them working. I got some of our smaller items into Baitong Restaurant yesterday. They support several other NGOs and social enterprises and have a small shop area at the front of the restaurant to display items such as honey from Mondulkiri, baskets from Battambang and pepper from Kampot. All good projects, all providing jobs.

Oh, and the website looks better organized (www.cambodiaknits.com) but the links are still AWOL and I want to put more information on it over the coming week. I also hope our graphic design guardian angel in Amsterdam gives us some advice...

Future Knitters

I wanted to post this since our visit to the community last week, but didn't have a chance until now.

On Friday Davy and I visited Toul Sambo again to have a short meeting with community members to tell them about Cambodia Knits training, working for CK, training dates and so on. When we arrived, Hope, a health organization (I have tried to look it up, but there are at least a dozen orgs with HOPE somewhere in their names) was there giving basic check-ups, distributing ARVs and holding a short meeting to pass on some health messages.

We introduced CK to everyone there. Some had met us the week before, but most people had been away for Pchum Ben so it was there first time to hear about the training and the possibility of working for us. I showed some of the completed monsters and they were very well received (lots of smiles from the kids). Everyone was very eager to give knitting a try, to see if they could learn how to make the funny creatures.

Surprisingly enough, there are several men who want to try as well! I had presumed that only women would be interested, as knitting is generally considered in the feminine domain (not saying I agree, but really, that is the generalization) perhaps even more so in Cambodia. I had always imagined that the project would be about helping women in these communities, but if men want to join, I can't and won't have any objections. One of the men used to work as a motodup (motorbike taxi driver for those not savvy in the ways of Cambodia) before the relocation. The city is too far for him to travel to from Toul Sambo. He has five children to support on his own and if knitting for CK is going to help him do that, all the power to him!

Some potential points of conflict: another organization, a medium sized international NGO working on various projects around Cambodia, has talked to the community leader and the vice-governor about setting up handicrafts training in the community. Their support, however, will stop at training and not provide any access to markets. Also, the community leader, who encouraged the community members to accept the relocation and who currently lives in PP in an apartment given as thanks for these efforts, is drawing up a proposal to get funding to build a handicrafts center and 20 sewing machines. Ultimately it will be up to the community to decide which is the most advantageous and suitable for them.

That being said, the above two proposals are 'in the air' and no one is certain how or indeed if they will materialize. Its important, however, to be aware of the other things that are in motion in the community and be prepared for any possibility. Again, having the support of Davy, who knows the community well will be invaluable. In the next few weeks, we'll visit the community once a week (myself and three knitters/trainers) to introduce the first steps of knitting, find out who is willing to commit to the training, collect some basic information about each family and start to build relationships. Building relationships based on trust and respect is not something that many businesses aim for with their employees, but for a social enterprise, I don't see how we can have any hope of success without it.

Photo time!

Some pictures for you to enjoy (sorry about the poor quality, don't what's going on...). This time of all the knitters and all of the finger puppets. We have elephants and monkeys, dogs and cats, giraffes and lions and pigs too. The knitters also developed their own version of a Cambodian cow. For those not in the know, Cambodian cows are very different from what we call a cow in North America and Europe. Cows aren't of the black and white variety, but a pale grey or white, with very long faces, pointy horns and skin that looks as though it is loosely draped over their thin frames. This morning (and they are almost done), they've been working on a water buffalo which I'll post pictures of tomorrow.

You can see the Cambodian cow finger puppet below. In the picture of Rofi (the lone knitter picture), the cow is the one between the pig and the monkey on her right hand. Its a darker colour of yarn than the actual cow but its quite appropriately Cambodian-cow shaped... don't you think?

Stitch by stitch

I guess at this early life stage of this blog it might be pertinent to explain why I am throwing caution to the wind and armed with only my enthusiasm and high expectations, starting a knitting co-op type social enterprise in Cambodia.

It all started when I was in Austria, a 6 year old child of a refugee family fleeing Communist Poland for a better life in Canada. Being so young, I didn’t fully understand the situation we were in, just that we weren’t home and were never going back. When my mother and sister started knitting hats and sweaters, I knew I had to get in on the action. I demanded to be instructed in the fine art of crochet and armed with a crochet hook and a string of yarn, I made my first chain. I was so proud of my creation, I wore it as a necklace and sometimes as a headband. Was my love of all things yarnish born then? Probably not, but I do remember the fascination and awe that stitch by stitch, a new entity was slowly created by my own two hands.

Stitch by stitch. That is what appeals to me most about knitting. It is a slow and laborious process, sometimes monotonous, always meditative, that results in an end product completely unlike what one starts with: two sticks and some yarn. Now, stitch by stitch I hope that I can help women in Cambodia improve their situations through fair, flexible and rewarding employment. Throughout the ages, women have clothed their families and kept them warm in winter, stitch by stitch, and now I hope that Cambodian women will have the chance to help their families (not with warmth, that’s not needed here), stitch by stitch.

Last month, I reentered the world of knit madness when I returned home for my father’s funeral. It was a difficult time, both sad and reflective. Getting back into knitting somehow helped me stay afloat in the emotional tsunami that lands shortly after the initial shock. It was a constant, a comfort, a connection to others. My sister, a knitting wizard, introduced me to Ravelry and the obsessive monster awoke, demanding to be fed more and more yarn, more patterns. It wanted to create, to clothe, to make things!

In the endless hours spent on the Internet looking at knitty things, I stumbled across an article about a woman who set up a small business in Bangladesh making high quality toys and baby knits for export. She’d started with $500 and four years later employs almost 3000 women. I was inspired and saw no reason holding me back from attempting something similar in Cambodia. I’ve never wanted to run my own business as making money was never something I was interested in. My driving force has always been ‘helping people’ at least trying to. I didn’t always know how to apply myself effectively to do that, nor am I a completely selfless do-gooder Mother Theresa type either.

I worked in NGOs for the past few years here in Cambodia and while that experience was rewarding, I’m hooked on the idea that social enterprise has the potential to reach more people, more directly with less strings (and reports) attached. Billions of dollars of aid have poured into Cambodia over the past decade and yet still the majority of the population lives on less than a dollar a day with limited access to clean water, health services, or education. Creating jobs for people, helping them earn a decent salary in order to be able to access those things and aim for more… I’m betting its an effective way to ‘help people’ help themselves.

Which is key. Aid is often too much about handouts not enough about sustainability. (I’m reading Easterly’s The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good). So many well intentioned NGO projects have a life span of months or a few years. This is not enough to build anything long lasting and once the project support is pulled, the cracks begin to appear. NGOs should still have a large part to play, especially in advocacy, but I am less enthusiastic then in the past about how effective they can be in a country basically overrun by NGOs. (I could say so much more here, but maybe another installment).

So there will be no Knitting Unlimited, Cambodian Human Rights and Knitting Association or Knit for Peace. Not even UNKNIT. Instead Cambodia Knits will aim to become a profitable business not through grants or donations, but by creating and producing high quality products for sale locally, electronically and through worldwide distribution. I hope along the way we can add on things like preschools at the knit centers, scholarships, or even use profits to build wells, buy chickens or goats, seeds or whatever the women feel their communities need. The ultimate goal is not to enrich some far away investors who provide cash for returns but to enrich the lives of the women we work with.

Getting started

This first thing I need to do before anything else, is get a good translator to help me. My Khmer is very basic and although I can get by at the market and around town, its not enough for talking to people in government offices or making inquiries at factories.

So the search for a translator begins!

I decided that it would be best, most appropriate really, to hire a female translator since I'd like the person involved to take up knitting in order to be able to translate patterns later on. Doing that will be impossible without knowing how to work with two sticks and a string and I really don't think there are too many Cambodian men willing to assault their masculinity by learning to knit. I was quite clear in the ad, stating that we are looking for a part-time female translator. Despite this, no less than 5 men have applied asking "is it ok that I am male?"

Hmmm?

Through the interview process I met a lot of interesting women, some with great English but most already working full time and hoping that the part time position could be done in the evenings and weekends. I was almost in despair when I finally interviewed the perfect candidate. Great English, free during the week and genuinely more interested in part time work in order to be able to spend more time with her son and who really understood what I was trying to do. As an added bonus, she is a hibernating knitter. Not for long!