Darlyne - Women, crafts, business

my name is Darlyne I am Ugandan I work for a company called Awava: where things come from we're a fair trade crafts organization we work with women in displaced situations to help them make money we work with African fabrics and source materials we want to make sure that a lot of the things we are making are from Uganda they are all women who were displaced by the war who had to leave their villages to end up in town so we teach them how to make the items we want them to make so what we do is we tell the tailors to make a sample see how long it takes them and they tell us how much they think we should pay them for that when we ask them how much they've been making it's laughable compared to how much we consider fair we make things for the home, things out of fabric, baskets, clothes then we'll get the stuff from them and export it to the US they're allowed to sell any of our designs in Gulu which is a huge price point for them because they make a lot of money there - there's a huge expat market our lead tailor is a lady called Lucy Auma who was the first person that Kate met Kate likes to tell the story she walks into the market and Lucy had a stall and all that was in the stall was Lucy sitting at her sewing machine nothing else and Kate goes in to talk to her and she's just curious: how come you're sitting here by yourself? and Lucy tells her I cleaned my church to put myself through sewing school and now I'm done I'm ready to start working and this is where I'm going to start so Kate gave her some work to do and she paid her for it and when Kate came back she noticed that Lucy had bought some fabric and hung it up in her shop it told Kate that this is a woman who is thinking about her future Lucy's been working for Kate for 4 years and she's built a house - she took us to her house which she completed with all that she has to do she has to pay school fees for so many children she has to take care of her aging parents on top of that she still has... she's just amazing - I don't know how else to say it it's not hard for us to get women to work for us because of the reputation that we built in the community they know they will get paid well for the work they do but because it's such a small company sometimes it's hard to accommodate everyone we can only take so many tailors... we're what is referred to as a social enterprise this is a business and we're in it to make money but that's not the be-all and end-all of the business we want to help people while we are making money this was a way for us to just cut all the *** and... ...just be the solution that we wanted to be but we also need to pay rent... ...and we need to pay for electricity and stuff like that we would be making a lot more money if we didn't pay our women fairly ...which is the whole idea of fair trade: we pay them a fair wage we pay them a lot more than market value the idea is that we just want to make enough to live on and not enough to buy mansions and drive Mercedes-Benzes maybe there just aren't enough fair trade companies to change the status quo it hasn't really changed a lot...