More Recruits

Every Saturday it's a different group.  I never know who to expect.  Sure, we teachers recruit new crafters from our classes, but the attendees themselves have also been spreading the word to their friends.  This past month has been a great time of learning.  We've had some experienced knitters volunteer to teach new patterns.  We've also had senior crafters teaching new arrivals the basics.  Here are some of the latest who have joined:
Jouzella came to the U.S. from Sudan in 2006.  Her husband is the pastor of the Sudanese church and also works at World Relief.  Jouzella is a homemaker and mother of 2 daughters.  She is looking for part-time work. In college she studied hotel management, and dreams of someday finishing college and working as a hostess in a hotel.  She has some experience in sewing and crocheting, and is currently learning how to knit.

Marry(left) and Mar Thar (Burmese version of the name Martha/right) are twin sisters from Burma.  They are part of the Karen ethnic group which has largely been persecuted by the Burmese military junta.  They were forced to flee the Burmese military with their family when they were 5 years old.  They hid in the jungle, moving from place to place every time the military came through for the next 8 years.  When they were 13, they finally made it across the border into Thailand and lived in a refugee camp there for the next 21 years.  They came to the U.S. in 2007.  Mary has seven children--one girl and six boys.  She had a job for a month and a half, but had to quit for health reasons.  She's currently looking for a new job.  Mar Thar has four children and four grandchildren.  Both Mary and Mar Thar are learning to knit, and making great headway.

Rabika moved from Bhutan to the Nepali refugee camp when she was 8 years old. She came to the U.S. January 2009 with her husband and 3 children.  Friends in the refugee camp taught her how to knit, and she's one of our more accomplished knitters.  She's looking for work here.  Someday she'd like to take GED classes and go back to school to become a nurse.

Nanda Maya (not yet pictured) is another who was forced out of Bhutan to Nepal 18 years ago.  She came to the U.S. very recently--September 2009.  She has three sons and no job.  She's currently looking for work, and would love to be able to help support her family in the future.  Rabika taught her how to knit since they live next door to each other here in the U.S.

Bishnu is another of the Bhutan/Nepal crowd.  She came to the U.S. summer 2009 with her husband, and three children.  Her husband is deaf and Bishnu has significant hearing loss herself, so communication with her is difficult to say the least.  She's quick to learn new things if she can be shown how to do them though.  She's been one of our most prolific jewelry-makers.  Lately, however, she's had some serious medical problems.  She was hospitalized with a small hole in her heart and needs surgery.  Unfortunately she's a tiny woman and doctors say she must gain weight before they can be confident enough to know she'd be able to recover from surgery.  So she's at home now, waiting.

A Very Successful Sale

On Sunday a family from Sue's church graciously opened their home in Oak Park to have a "Crafts of the World" sale.  They invited us to come set up a table.  Sue and I put on our best sales-people faces and went.  We found a very receptive audience.  We didn't have to do much, as the quality of the scarves and pictures of the ladies who made them got everyone's attention.  All told, we sold $460-worth of knitting and jewelry.  What a blessing!  Thank you Sacco family!

Volunteers and New Recruits

This past Saturday we were blessed to have a couple volunteers from Jericho Road Church come help out and hang out with our crafting group.  We put Marissa to work right away teaching two Sudanese ladies how to knit.  It looked and sounded like they had a lot of fun in the process.  The other volunteer, Val, helped us out by taking some really great pictures.  We'll be using the photos throughout the blog and to make some business cards to hand out at sales.

We were also really excited to have several new recruits come.  Up to now, it's mostly been our little group from Nepal and one woman from Iraq.  This week we had two from Sudan, and several from Burma join us.  We're becoming quite the multicultural gathering.  It's fun to see the group interact with us and with each other.  Miream, our Iraqi lady, has seemed a bit isolated since she doesn't speak enough English to converse with anyone, and no one else speaks Chaldean or Arabic.  But this week the Sudanese ladies (who also speak Arabic) were able to chat with her and have even offered to start giving her a ride on Saturday mornings since they live close by each other.  Miream seemed really happy to have someone to talk to, and help her with translation.

We also took some pictures of our stock, eventually hoping to get to the point of selling online.  The kids were excited to help model.

The Search for a Fiscal Sponsor Begins

You probably could have guessed that starting a business is...a tricky business.  It involves a level of hoop-jumping that three ESL teachers weren't really prepared for.  One of our first business buys was Non-Profits for Dummies, I kid you not.  We've learned that a good way to buy time to figure everything out is to first find a "fiscal sponsor."  This would be a larger, more established organization (one, ideally, with a similar purpose) which would agree to be our parent organization until we can get ourselves figured out enough to be on our own.It's a quick way to get legally recognized as a business so that we can continue having sales while we work on things like writing our business plan and hiring our artisans.  We've got some meetings this coming week with some people who we hope will be able to help us convince a certain organization to be our fiscal sponsor.  I'm hoping we can get this done quickly so that we can have more local sales and begin selling online ASAP.

Meet Our Artisans

Due to bad weather and a lot of people being out sick, we had a small but cozy meeting of crafters this Saturday.  I got the pleasure of sitting with each one and chatting (mostly via translator) with them about their life in order to put up a personal profile of each person.  It was nice to learn a little more about some of our participants.  As I said, many of them didn't make it this weekend so I'll be adding more as they come, but here's a start.

Goma is our resident translator for the Nepali/Bhutanese attendees.  She was born in Bhutan, but was forced to move to a refugee camp in Nepal when she was young (more on the history of that conflict to follow in a future post).  Like all our recent arrivals from that part of the world, she spent the last 18 years in the refugee camp.  As refugees they were not allowed to work in Nepal, but they found ways to make a little money and keep themselves busy within the camp.  Goma attended and completed high school in the camp and learned to knit hats and scarves to sell.  She came to the U.S. in April 2009 and has been able to find part-time work here in a factory.  In the future she'd like to go to college and study to become a nurse.

Deoka (pronounced Day-Oh-Kah) is Goma's mother.  She has graciously allowed us to use her living room for our meetings as it happens to be centrally located for many of the participants.  She and her husband and five children spent 18 years in the refugee camp in Nepal.  Their family came to the U.S. in April, though only three of the five (adult) children came.  She did not attend any school growing up but is now able to come regularly to ESL classes at World Relief.  With her very limited knowledge of English she has been unable to find work here in the U.S., though other members of her family, like Goma, are working.  With the money from her sales she'd like to save up to buy some new clothes.

Dil Maya (on the right) was born and grew up in Bhutan.  She learned to knit from her mother when she was ten years old.  She's one of our most accomplished knitters.  In the picture she's showing Miream (Iraqi) how to start a scarf.  She's been able to make a wide variety of knitted items with different styles and patterns.  It's always exciting to find out what she's done lately.  Like the others, she moved with her husband and kids to the Nepali refugee camp 18 years ago.  They and their four children came to to the U.S. in June 2009.  She's currently studying English and job-readiness in the hopes of getting a job here soon.

Hari M is another from the Nepal/Bhutan contingent.  She and her husband and five of their seven (!) kids came to the U.S. in January.  Her other two children are married and live in New York and California, respectively.  She learned to knit from her friends in the refugee camp in Nepal.  She also is studying English and hopes to someday get a job here.

Miream was part of a Chaldean Christian minority in Iraq.  She and her husband and three grown children came to the U.S. in May 2009. Unlike many other refugees, their family didn't spend any time in a refugee camp.  We suspect that they came as a result of religious persecution, but since Miream only speaks Chaldean, it's hard to find a translator who is able to ask.  She's one of our most faithful attenders and seems perfectly happy to sit and work together with a room full of people with whom she can't converse.

This is only who attended this weekend.  Our biggest group is currently from Bhutan/Nepal, but we've got some ladies from Sudan and hopefully a group from Burma who will also be attending soon.  As we get to be too many for Deoka's living room, we'll have to decide what to do next--perhaps open another living room location elsewhere?  If you'd be interested in volunteering on Saturday mornings, let us know.

First things first.

Resilient Crafts is a non-profit organization which works to empower refugees resettled in the Chicago area.  We provide refugees with a method of earning a supplemental income through the creation and sale of traditional crafts.  We also give crafters English lessons for sales and financial literacy lessons for understanding taxes and saving.  Our weekly meetings also have the side benefit of giving the crafters a community of friends from several different cultures.

There are three main organizers of this non-profit.  They are Sue, Heather, and Kara.

Sue is a specialist in Adult ESL Literacy, which means she works with refugees and immigrants who had little or no formal education in their home country.  She was born and raised in the Chicago area and worked for two and a half years in a refugee camp in the Philippines with Southeast-Asian refugees.  She’s been working with World Relief for over 20 years.

Heather is an adult ESL teacher who has taught a range of levels at World Relief.  She’s currently teaching a refugee orientation and ESL class with World Relief in Aurora.  Prior to that, she spent a year in Thailand working in a Thai orphanage.  She was also a volunteer coordinator for a homeless shelter in Indiana for seven years.

Kara teaches Literacy and Job-Readiness at World Relief and Level 4 ESL at the College of DuPage.   She’s taught a range of ESL levels in the past few years.  She’s been teaching at World Relief since the last semester of her grad degree in Intercultural Studies and TESOL at Wheaton in 2007.  She’s an MK who lived in Liberia, Zambia, Suriname, and New York growing up.  She's also the resident blogger for this venture.