Africa: My Journey In Uganda (Part 3)
Shanley Knox -- Contributor -- @ BylineBeat
(Uganda, Africa) My vision for Nakate centers not only on female artisans in the third world, but artisans in the third world that haven’t been given a market before and thus don’t know how to make the kind of quality goods as do other women. As our model developed in Uganda, we’ve found that it works best to bring women in that are excellent at their trade, then have them teach the women working for us. Slowly, we stop buying from the women that are good at what they do and pick more and more pieces from the women that are learning.
Quality control is an integral part of that process, and I believe that it’s one of the best ways to not only teach women skills as artisans, but as people that will be going out and beginning other businesses with the capitol they earn through Nakate. If you can learn that the quality of a necklace matters, then you know that the quality of your milk or meat or the clothes you’re selling at a booth at the market in fact, matters. If you see that a dirty necklace doesn’t sell, you learn to make your things, and hopefully keep your things, in a clean environment. If I have learned anything in Africa, it’s poverty does not have to equal uncleanliness.
Today was my first day running quality control on the ground, and it was one of the hardest things I’ve done so far. It’s the most disappointing thing in the world to send a woman away holding the majority of a group of necklaces she was hoping would help to feed her children. I fought back tears and made myself see the bigger picture. The ongoing training process is important, and when a woman doesn’t try very hard, or she inserts plastic where I asked for metal, she needs to be held to the standard she’s been given, or she will never regain her pride. If there is no standard to meet, no earning present in your work, then there is no pride in your work – and pride in your work is of the utmost importance, especially as an otherwise marginalized woman.
I know that, in just a few months, several of these women will have a market stalls, and I hope many of them think back to today, dusty and full of smoke, and remember that I told them that it’s important for their products to be the same size, for beads to be formed neatly, for them to not leave them in the dirt or put in blue where they were supposed to be using black. I hope that the way I taught them to to hold up a necklace and check the quality for themselves helps them in their endeavors, not only working for me, but working to make clothing, baskets, or present food in the kind of small restaurant some of the women are saying they hope to open.
I hope that the explanation of colors, checking one against another, looking with their eye to see if it matches with a white person’s skin, and bringing several of one kind of piece helps them to begin, on a local scale, to perceive customer care, marketing to a certain audience and uniformity in their products.
I smiled at the women who walked out the door with the expectation of enough, some of them even more than enough. But the women who didn’t took chunks of my heart. And I sat there hoping that, as our work plays out, their products improve and we work together towards becoming women that understand quality when we see it, especially when it comes from our own hands.
Just hours later, it began to happen. One by one, women whose work had been less than quality began showing up to the house where I am staying, offering work that met my standards and changed to please me.
I saw in their faces that it’s already happening – when I accepted their work, there was a quiet strength in their eyes, and I could see pride beginning to form; in themselves, in the work of their hands, and in the work that, together, we are going to do to change our lives.
Africa: My Journey In Uganda (Part 1)
Africa: My Journey In Uganda (Part 2)
Photos from Uganda by Shanley Knox
Editor's Note: Every Tuesday over the next six weeks, Byline Beat will publish Shanley Knox's online journal of her experiences living and working with the women of Uganda.
