Women empowerment

This is a true story. A poor woman (let’s call her Minda) in her mid-forties with five children lives in the dinky home with her mother and her grandmother. Her husband, a tricyle driver, was the only breadwinner for the family. Due to the difficulty of life, the husband was often bitter, talking down on his wife that he even had to take care of her mother and grandmother. There was no way anyone would ever employ Minda at her age and state. Minda was depressed and desperate.

Minda soon met up with a community of other women who taught her how to recycle plastic bags, how to stretch them, separate them based on colors. Soon Minda was holding a crochet needle and working on these plastics, producing fashion lifestyle bags designed by artist Ann Wizer, another dynamic woman who started the Invisible Sisters Group. Minda’s husband was still laughing at her for working with “garbage.” These bags came to us at ECHOstore and soon started to sell P300, P800, some at P1,200. Minda would take home the money, get the price tag of the bag and place it on their cracked bathroom mirror. Soon that mirror was filled up with price tags indicating the sales of her bags. Minda was putting food on the table! And her husband stopped laughing at her and started to support her. Minda was empowered, was feeling creative, was earning money, had a livelihood. Minda is just one of many in that group of the Invisible Sisters whose lives were uplifted.

In most developing countries, it is primarily men who are afforded opportunities to seek decent employment. Women are charged with the sole care for the family and household and made dependent on a man’s income. Livelihood opportunities like those of Minda attest to the power of women empowerment! We have many of such stories as we come face to face with poverty. It is these stories that we never tire of recounting to customers at ECHOstore Sustainable Lifestyle. But our stories at ECHOstore are positive and happy because we have begun to empower them as we meet them in livelihood community groups during our product development workshops all over the country.

These stories of women empowerment are what fuel our passion to continue what we do — sell, sell, sell community-created fair trade products. For each sale we conclude echoes to a livelihood opportunity for many women groups. It is also interesting to note that almost 95 percent of product suppliers at ECHOstore are made by small women group, and also almost 80 percent of customers who buy from ECHOstore are women! They buy for their families and friends, they buy for their husbands, they buy for themselves. The transformative power of women cannot be stressed more than this month as we continue to celebrate the 100th year of International Women’s Day (March 8). This celebration began in Copenhagen in 1910 when a group of women in pursuit of equal employment opportunities came together at an International Conference of Working Women and created the idea of celebrating an international day for women. The inaugural International Women’s Day was then honored the following year, in 1911, in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland. This spirit of women empowering women is now part of the fiber of many groups all over the world.

In a talk ECHOstore gave in Davao a couple of months back at the Kamindanawan, an event of the NGO Mindanao Commission on Women (MCW), I met close to 75 women community leaders from Mindanao. This congress gathering presented the achievements and challenges related to the peace negotiation, the developmental goals Mindanao is working towards 2020. They also launched the “Green House Project,” which is the campaign for lifestyle and policy changes for a sustainable environment. The MCW continues to influence policy and programs with both government and private sector from a perspective of women’s needs.

My take away from that visit was a remarkable admiration for these women as they stood for and continued to work for peace in Mindanao. The Mothers for Peace movement is the grassroots base of the MCW. Mothers brought their children together in youth camps to teach peace, to interact between Muslim and Christian, to begin the peace process in the hearts of the youth. We, who are in the city, take peace for granted. But there in the war-torn Mindanao areas, peace is a rarity and progress much sought after. These women leaders sat, discussed, looked to build a strong supportive community. During socials and program time, the various cultural groupings came in their beautiful colorful indigenous costumes. The T-bolis, Bla’an, Mandaya, Manobos, Subanen, Maranaw, Bagobo were some I could recognize in that sea of colors and patterns.

From Mindanao, we have put on ECHOstore shelves products like weavings and accessories from Claret Samal Foundation that helps the Badjaos and Sama Dilaut groups, T-boli and T-nalak accessories woven and created by women, traditional tablea cocoa and bignay wines from Puentespina Farms (dynamically headed by two generations of women: the matriarch Charita Puentespina and her daughter-in-law, our original Filipino cheesemaker Olive Puentespina who are themselves empowering many with employment for their successful enterprises); Bio-dynamis tea granules and jellies; and even lampshades made of durian pulp.

Women helping women, empowering and transforming lives, allowing their hearts to shine forth... My hubby has always told me that women are the stronger sex because they can express love in the fullest capacity, from the gentlest and sweetest part of the soul. He has always told me that a woman’s love has the capacity to transform man at his core. I so fully agree with him!

And so I end my women’s article with a quote from Margaret Sanger, a noted American sex educator and birth control activist who founded the American Birth Control League: “Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression.”