Visiting the Weavers

Visiting the Weavers

Yesterday morning, before I had my three hours of teaching English in the afternoon, my friend Million took me to visit a friend from her hometown in Western Ethiopia who owns a company which exports fabrics, shawls, scarves etc, as well as pottery.  It was fascinating.  I saw people winding thread onto bobbins and master weavers using either old fashioned looms built by hand out of tree limbs and others using more modern looms. Their work was with threads almost as thin as spider webs and they could pick threads between the warps as quickly as I could sneeze. This picking was with contrasting thread and made a special design. At present one of the weavers was making a shawl for the wife of Meles, the president of Ethiopia. He showed me another he had made following Empress Tita’s design (from the 1850s) Beautiful. And they threw their shuttles so fast!

We also saw potters making chickens, preparing the formed clay for the kiln.  Zara, the owner and tourgiver said virtually all of the work is exported. All the pottery goes to France, where they are wild about it, and the cloth goes to Bloomingdale’s, Barney’s and J. Crew.  In the last two weeks, she said they produced 23000 piece of fabric for export to Bloomingdales.

I was also told that craftsmen are the lowest of the low on Ethiopian’s social strata because they work with their hands and that is not appreciated (even though the work I saw was just beautiful!)  Zara has 400 employees and has as an objective to help these people become assimilated into the larger culture, without the stigma they have themselves about their status. Each day they are offered a cooked subsidized meal, and once a week they have “assimilation” where everyone at the company eats together, regardless of job.  Many of the weavers I saw, all men but one, are 5^th or 6^th or 7^th generation weavers from their family, so you can see how ingrained their status would be inside them.

We are saying goodbye and packing today. Lots of details to attend to.

I still want to tell you about the restaurant we ate at last night, a cultural one with ethnic food and native dancing from many different Ethiopian tribes. Great fun.  If I have time later today I’ll add that, otherwise tomorrow when I get home (probably between naps!).

God bless you all.  Carolyn