The Beads Project

I have been working with three girls from the village on a glass beads project for about a month and a half now. This project is probably my biggest responsibility and it’s definitely the most challenging (and sometimes - usually? - frustrating) thing I work on in Tsintsabis.

 

Stasja first got the idea for the project when he heard of a 3-week bead-making seminar at a women’s development center called Penduka in Windhoek. A Ghanaian bead-making expert had been invited to come teach deaf women to make glass beads out of recycled bottles; Stasja asked Penduka if they would be interested in helping another disadvantaged population – Bushmen – by allowing some girls from Tsintsabis to attend the seminar. He already had three women from the village in mind and by early March they had secured grant money from a small Dutch foundation to attend the seminar.

 

I arrived in Namibia a week before the women finished the seminar. I’ve been working with them since the middle of April building a clay oven (a “kiln”) and a roof to cover the oven, buying supplies to make the beads into jewelry, and securing more funding to get the project off the ground. I’ve also been helping them organize their time and use their resources, the most important of which is free labor from Treesleeper, as effectively as possible.

 

Working with them is kind of like herding cats. Each girl is independent, a little stubborn, opinionated, and (around me) shy. In the beginning I was having a hard time getting them to work together. I didn’t know any of them or their personalities and I felt a little strange stepping in and taking the lead since they were the ones who were supposedly the experts in oven-building and also because I am white (It is uncomfortable to step right into the colonial white role of ordering people [blacks] around. I realize now that they have come to expect such orders and that it is incredibly hard to coax them into telling me what they want since I’m both white and a man.) None of them wanted to listen to the others' ideas. Collecting clay for the oven from termite hills went smoothly enough because there isn’t much teamwork involved, but when it came to oven-building, small issues that had merely caused mild tension blew up. The result was that, for reasons ranging from oven collapse to oven destruction to oven-building apathy to gossip, it took three weeks to build a clay oven.

 

When Stasja gave me the project, he told me not to expect things to happen quickly. We set a goal for the grass roof and the oven to be finished by the time he left for Holland, which was about 2 weeks ago. It seemed to me to be a generously conservative goal, but as it turns out, that law – the one that says what can go wrong will go wrong – well, it holds as well, maybe better, in Tsintsabis as in the US.

 

When we finished the oven, instead of immediately starting on the grass roof, I went to Windhoek to buy a few things that the ladies would need to finally produce beads. I figured it was better to take advantage of their enthusiasm in the wake of finishing the oven to make beads rather than to run the risk of quashing it with more manual labor. When I got back, I gave the girls the supplies and they went to work. I was relieved that we had actually finished the oven and I was expecting them to start making beads and jewelry like pros. What actually happened was that 80% of the beads turned out misshapen or only half-melted. Damn!

 

That was last Tuesday. At the end of last week, I spent a morning with them to get a full progress report and to do some troubleshooting. It turns out that they made a lot of simple errors in the process of preparing the bottles to be melted. I hadn’t anticipated these problems because I assumed they knew what they were doing. Other factors that I had not anticipated, like too much wind, a lack of good firewood, and their best bead-shaper being sick, also helped derail the process. We discussed the problems and together came up with solutions that will hopefully help the process run more smoothly this week.

 

Tomorrow Paul, my assistant project manager, the girls, and I will once again try to make some beads. Hopefully our new plans and a bit of luck will put the beads project on the road to temporary success. Otherwise, we will have to go back to the drawing board.