Our office porch gets a new name
Thursday, July 16th, 2009
The Warm Heart office porch now has a new name – the Mae Wan Microenterprise Knowledge Center – and a small (well, tiny) budget (10,000 baht, about $300).
It did not take long for the word to get out, either. Within days the “old ladies’ group” of our local temple had moved in and now our porch is humming with activity. The ladies are nominally learning to weave (better) but really they are just having a fine old time hanging our with each other and being doted upon by the entire staff.
Once the threads are sorted, they have to be threaded through the lifts. This takes hours and hours and hours. A complex pattern can take six or seven women two days to complete this exacting task.
The Microenterprise and Microfinance Project has spent the past two weeks transforming the front “porch” of the Mae Wan offices into a training space. Mae Joom has set up her big loom for weaving trainings. We have two – and will soon have ten more – spinning wheels, a large collection of very, very large pots for boiling roots, leaves and whatnot to make dye, and a triple decker “table” made of slats and mosquito netting for silk worms. (We are currently nurturing about 20,000 very small worms, which will take about two and a half more weeks before they spin their cocoons.) Rough wood shelving along two walls hold a strange collection of machetes, mesh dippers, big balls of string and bamboo baskets. Two huge green plastic tubs hold industrial strength rubber gloves, aprons made of old outdoor advertising banners, tools, box cutters and nails. Tall, black plastic tubes of the kind that architects use to carry blueprints around in stand in corners full of large teaching posters with garish pictures of silk worms in every stage of growth.
The beginnings of the Knowledge Center, spinning wheel, bundles of thread, mortar and pestle for grinding dyes and all
The MMP is ready for Monday August 17, date of the first scheduled, soup-to-nuts, combined microfinance and microenterprise training. Tan Nai’Ok, our Sub-District head, was so impressed by our sweaty preparations, however, that he named us the “Mae Wan Microenterprise Knowledge Center” and gave us a budget without waiting!