Hands on!

This was a really exciting week of work. On Monday Laura and I met with Alice (the Ghanaian Alice) and showed her how to produce our jewelry roll and then we went to visit Sarah to work on some Batik designs.

Alice's space was only big enough to house a small cutting table (smaller than my wingspan), three sewing machines, a computer desk (which her husband runs his wedding video business from), her assistant, and barely the rest of us comfortably...though many more friends stopped in to say hello and see what we were up to! Alice and I shared a stool while I talked her through the steps of constructing the jewelry roll. She kept commenting, "this is too complex", what I learned to be the equivalent of a self-effacing comment. The Ghanaians seem to live by the "under promise, over deliver" mantra! Alice turned out to be more than capable. As we were working through the project she often jumped ahead of me and offered suggestions...not to mention if you look at her wall, you can see a collection of pictures of very COMPLEX styles that she can probably create with her eyes closed! Only about 9o minutes later, we emerged with a sample. I will attach pictures when I have a computer that will let me! I think it turned out quite well!

Alice is great, she is married and a mother of a little boy named Gregory. She bought me my first Ghanaian doughnut, called a bofurt (sp?). It was SO tasty...as all fried bread usually is! She asked what my favorite thing to cook was and I explained that I was a disaster in the kitchen...at which she balked and explained that I must learn while I am in Ghana so that I can make a good wife...lol. Well...I gave in, if not to be a good wife, at least to feed myself tasty food in the future. I will be going to her house next week to learn a couple Ghanaian staples. We will start easy (SURE....) with jollof rice (the Ghanaian version of dirty rice) and red red (a black eyed pea stew).

After Alice's we darted off to the tro-tro station (that is the vans that function as mass transit) to take a tro to Mpenseam where Sarah has her Batik studio. The village was lovely and all of the kids were more than happy to welcome us with their favorite song:
"Obruni, how are you
I am fine
Thank you!"
This seems to be how Ghanaian children learn their first english. If you ask most of them "how are you" they will respond "fine, how are you". But if you ask anything else to the youngest ones, they will look at you with a BIG smile and NO response! :)

Sarah walked us through the Batik process, while we showed her how we would like a specific design to be done. She was more than happy to let us try our hand at the stamping and the dying...it is not as easy as it looks! When we told her the colors we would like for the designs, she commented (it's becoming infamous already) "this is quite complex". Apparently "fashion" colors like coral and teal are difficult for the batikers to achieve and then replicate, but she was up for the challenge. Sarah has been with Global Mamas a little less than a year, she is very excited to be a part of GM because it will help her to pay the rent of her studio and try more interesting designs. She works by herself right now, but would like to be able to take on employees and apprentices. The designs came back to the office yesterday and received some nice compliments from Gayle and Patience who run the office here.

Needless to say, Monday was a very exciting day...after that I have worked on designs for a sign and fliers for Esther, handed off a diaper bag pattern to Mensa, a wallet design to Essie, pulled together 2 more batik stamps and developed a measurement comparison chart to look at our sizes against our competitors (thank you corporate america for teaching me that one!). I also received the list of fit complaints I will be working on and a list of new style developments that I will be helping to follow up on. WOO HOO!!!

That's all for now!