Trade-Link

And me

A photo of the beadmakers

I'm helping to run some camps for children at the moment, and am nowhere near a hotspot for sending you blogs. Meanwhile, here are photos of the beadmakers, and me.

Bead Women

I arrived with a group of seven sixteen year olds at the refugee community. We drove up the bumpy track past the quarry to the sound of the constant thud of hammers as the women and children bashed the rocks for concrete. The children smile, wave and shout, but many of the adults stare with eyes grown cold from hardship, full of mistrust.

We climb out of the vehicles and are lead up through the dwellings. They are made  mainly of orange mud and sticks. Endless rows of shiny coloured beads brighten the alleyways as they hang in the afternoon sun to dry. The few men who live here sit around playing games of drafts with bottle tops. In this village it is mainly the women who are the workers and money earners. It is something built deep into the northern Ugandan culture.

We cannot believe that whole families are living in mud houses perhaps the size of the cupboard under our stairs.

Little Coal Boy

You look out at me from the pile of blackness, hands and face grubby from lifting the coal.

You must be four years old but your eyes are not the eyes of a child. You wear a purple rag over your pot belly and your spindly legs show beneath. Flies gather and feed on the fluid leaking from the cuts on your knees.

Trained to beg, you raise your small hands out of your dark den. By day your family sends you to the streets of Kampala alone to beg from wealthy mzungas, white men.

Your home, a filthy coal shed, your father a drunk and your garden path a river of sewage. Your mother is not there but at work in the brothel area, but if she was there she would not notice you amongst the coal as your baby sisters and brothers also need food.

You look at me and your eyes plead. Helpless I gulp and turn away. There are thousands like you, just like you. I am lead on through this unimaginable world.

Ugandan Quarry Women and TRADE-LINK

The women I met living in the refugee communities have fled Northern Uganda after their husbands were killed by the LRA.  In order to feed and clothe themselves and their children and put their children into school, they will do whatever work they can.  As do the children.  I mentioned in the post about the Recycled Paper Bead Jewellery that the only other alternative to craftwork is working in a Ugandan quarry.

The women, and children, have to break stones by hand to make gravel for concrete.  TRADE-LINK hopes to free the women and children from this gruelling and dangerous work.

Recycled Paper Bead Jewellery from Uganda

These beads were made from strips of wound up recycled paper by a community of refugees from war-torn Uganda.

The Ugandan women who make the beads are in their late teens and twenties. They have young children to provide for and must earn a living, not only by making beads but by smashing rocks into dust in a local quarry to be used for concrete.. This work is dangerous and physically taxing.

By buying these products, you are helping support these woman and their families. You are enabling them to pay for education for their children and are encouraging these women to work producing beautiful jewellery instead of working in dangerous conditions for next to no pay.  All proceeds will go towards improving the quality of life for this community such as sending the children to school and helping them to build new and more substantial homes.