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Fabric scraps help women pick up the pieces

Published: 09/10/2009 05:00

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A small Japanese group provides training to the wives of HIV-infected men.

Akiyo (R) from Japan teaches people to make Furoshiki, a Japanese traditional bag, in Ho Chi Minh City’

Ti no longer earns a living as a xe om driver to bring prostitutes to work.

She and dozens of other HIV-infected men’s wives have been hired by a group of three Japanese women to sew wrapping cloth.

The mother of three in Go Vap District, Ho Chi Minh City, said she now has a safe job, earning around VND1 million (US$56) a month and still has time to do housework and take care of her children.

Every Friday, the seamstresses deliver their work to Japanese girls at a house on Hai Ba Trung Street, and take home fabric scraps to join them into colorful wrapping cloth.

Mai, a mother of four children whose husband died several years ago of HIV/AIDS, said she had been struggling to find jobs before she was introduced to the Furoshiki project, started last autumn and named after the Japanese word for “wrapping cloth.”

“Firms nearby won’t receive me as they know that I’m infected. And it’s inconvenient for me to travel far away. I’m not strong enough.”

Mai has earned around VND1 million a month from the project since March.

“That actually cannot cover all the expenditures but we feel more secure,” she said.

The project also provides income for old women like Tu, who has to wear two pairs of glasses to work.

Tu said people at Furoshiki are not sticklers for age and by working at home, she can lie down for a rest any time she feels tired.

The 59-year-old added she doesn’t have to wait a month to get paid, instread she receives the money upon delivery of the cloth.

Akiyo and Aki of Japan, who are running the project, find themselves busy every day collecting fabric scraps and old clothes.

“These are the materials for Furoshiki,” said Akiyo, who has been living in Vietnam for six years, has married a Vietnamese and speaks the language fluently, as do her colleagues Aki and Maiko.

Akiyo deals with finance issues while Aki is in charge of designing the cloth and instructing the needlewomen.

Maiko, initiator of the project, told Thanh Nien in an email from Japan that the idea occurred to her when she visited women and child victims of HIV/AIDS in makeshift rooms in HCMC.

She said she didn’t have money to give them or open a company to take them out of street life, so she started to collect cloth leftovers from garment companies and residents for the project.

The project aims to provide the infected women a way to earn a living just by staying in their rented rooms, Maiko said.

Yet the three Japanese women are rather strict about the cloth quality and they won’t accept cloth that contains sewing errors.

“The seamstresses only need thread and needles and their job is to join fabric scraps into bigger cloth to produce pieces of art that can be used for different purposes other than wrapping.”

Maiko said that the project managers also wished to make people use more cloth bags and less plastic bags.

Although Furoshiki is a Japanese traditional bag, Akiyo said the bags would not be strange in Vietnam, where people in the old times used a similar cloth bag called tay nai (knapsack).

“That is the Furoshiki of Vietnam.”

The made-in-Vietnam Furoshiki has been consumed mostly in Japan as Maiko knocks on many doors in Japan including stores, cafés, exhibitions, and yoga centers to promote the product.

Some of the bags have been sold to visitors from France.

VietNamNet/TN

Provide by Vietnam Travel

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