FairTrade & Village Handcrafts of Laos

Rolled Paper Mats.

 

 

Fair Trade and Village Crafts of Lao.

Lao PDF is the most heavily bombed country per capita in the world. During the Vietnam War, the United States dropped a planeload of bombs every eight minutes for nine years. One positive bye product of this bombing was the emergence of Kommaly Chanthavong, a farmer’s wife who abandon her village after it was bombed, and went on to establish the Mulberries Silk Farm in Phonsavan. Her establishment is a fair trade business,  attempts to retrain Lao women in the art of silkworm farming, spinning, and weaving silk cloth. There are many such free trade businesses in Lao. A retail gallery Saoban a busness with  socialprinciples  in Vientiane ,only sells products from rural villages to create employment for villagers, particularly women , in an attempt to reduce poverty. They stock a wide range of crafts items, silk, wooden sculptures, spoons made in aluminium scrap recovered from bomb and plane parts.

Bomb Spoons

Raw Material.

Recycled paper items, like the one illustrated above are created by the Lao Disabled Women’s Development Centre. There are unfortunately   many disabled people in Lao, injured each year from unexploded bombs. The villagers of Ban Napia  make spoons and jewellery from bomb parts, hopefully to encourage the world to make every day utensils, rather than destructive bombs. This collection work is highly dangerous, but an economic necessity in a poor province. Collectors receive some 8000 kip per kilo [$1], considered by the locals as a profitable enterprise. Naturally, many are killed or injured each year, and one only hopes that eventually the world will start to take serious action on this unexploded ordnance problem.   

The major tradition Lao craft however is silk weaving, which is why Kommaly effort in establishing her Mulberries farm is so important. The farm acts as both teacher and mentor , allowing village women to develop their skills to the fullest. The mulberry trees are approached along a path lined with planting of different flowers and shrubs used to make the various coloured dyes. The trees are pruned very hard every four years or so, to make harvesting the leaves easier, worms eat some one ton of green matter every day. The orchard is organically managed , with a mulch weed control. A propagation shed houses several million silk worms, hard at work producing cocoons. When complete some are retained for stock replacement, while the remained are boiled before extracting the silken thread. One cacoon will produce some thirty metres thread. These are then dyed in the natural coloured dyes extracted from the farm flowers, and plants.

Finally, I moved to the weaving studio, were several women were busy over their looms. Highly skilled weavers over see the work, making suggestions were appropriate about colour, and design. Many of the designs take months to produce twenty centimetres of cloth. The weavers are fully trained in all aspects of silk worm farming, and the production of silk, so when they return to their villages they may act as mentors to other village women. The Mulberry Farm does not abandon them, but continues to act in a advisory role in helping with sales and technical matters.

It is little wonder that Kommaly was nominated for the Noble Peace Prize in 2005, and was awarded the UNESCO  award for advancing the lives of women in Lao. The world needs many more Kommalys .