Fair trade parties

from the San Francisco Chronicle

Now there is a fair trade scheme that follows the Tupperware model. This one helps women in Uganda. - Kale

Meredith May, Chronicle Staff Writer

After work one Thursday, a group of women friends gathered for Chardonnay and goat cheese at a posh home in Los Altos.

A veritable pirate's booty of colorful beaded jewelry was piled on the dining room table, where the women spent most of the evening trying on bracelets and necklaces.

Welcome to the Tupperware party of the new millennium. In the Bay Area and across the nation, women are gathering in homes and churches to buy colorful beads made by women from an Ugandan village.

The women of Kampala make the beads out of magazine paper. BeadforLife, the Colorado nonprofit behind the movement, imports and sells the beads at bead parties and online, and the money goes back to Kampala to buy land and build homes, send children to school, and help the women start businesses and improve their health through malaria treatments and mosquito nets. And at the bead parties, guests are discussing how to use their buying power to lift an entire Ugandan village out of extreme poverty.

"The draw is the beads, but really, it's an opportunity to get a discussion going about extreme poverty and how if we work collectively, we can change people's lives," said Julie King of Redwood City, one of the first handful of BeadforLife "ambassadors" in the United States.

Many of the beadmakers have been widowed by AIDS and war. Before BeadforLife started, they lived in mud huts on less than a dollar a day - not enough to feed their families or afford school uniforms so their children could get an education.

Today, BeadforLife is raising $3.5 million annually, and sends the bulk of it directly to Kampala. Now, the women earn $5 and $6 dollars a day, on par with a Ugandan police officer's salary. They have bank accounts now, and the average balance for each woman is $436.

The first Kampala beads arrived in the United States in 2003, in the luggage of two Colorado women who bought the beads from an African woman making them outside her hut, and selling them to the rare passers-by for $1 a strand. Torkin Wakefield and Ginny Jordan gave the jewelry to friends and wore it themselves, and noticed an immediate reaction. The jewelry was such a hit, the women returned to Kampala to buy bagsful. They met with 100 women in Kampala, and talked about starting a supply chain.

"They met the women and said, 'I think we can do much better for you,' " said King.

There are 300 women making the beads now, and 100 more enrolled in a training program to learn how. Using long, triangular strips of magazine paper, the Ugandan women roll the beads, glue and shellac them, and string them into necklaces and bracelets that have made it into the fashion pages of such magazines as InStyle and O.
Beads to boarding school

BeadforLife bought 18 acres of land in Kampala, and teamed up with Habitat for Humanity to help the women build 80 homes and pay for them with their earnings and sweat equity.

The women are no longer sharing latrines with 10 other families. Where before they would eschew free AIDS antiretroviral drugs because the medicine made them hungry and they couldn't afford food, now they don't have to make such choices. Many have vegetable gardens.

BeadforLife also pays for a hospital bed at the local hospital's charity ward so if anyone from Kampala has an emergency, there is a place reserved for them to get care.

The nonprofit is changing lives like that of Joan Ahimbisibwe, an HIV-positive beader, who bought a piglet with her jewelry earnings. With the money she made from selling the pig, she moved her three children from a hut to a storefront. During the day she sells sugar and vegetables. At night the family sleeps on a mattress behind the counter. Today, she has enough income to put her daughter through private boarding school.

Word-of-mouth success

BeadforLife doesn't do any grant writing, and donations make up just 5 percent of its revenue. The overwhelming majority of its money comes from women buying beads, a strand at a time. It's a female word-of-mouth phenomenon. Founder Wakefield is now living in Uganda the majority of the year to oversee the program.

"We've tapped into this incredible desire to participate in helping people overcome poverty, and there's something so tangible about the beads," said Devin Hibbard, North America director for BeadforLife.

Colleges have started BeadforLife chapters, churches are getting involved, and a chiropractor in Los Altos is selling them in his office.

King brings her book of Kampala snapshots to bead parties. She shows guests what extreme poverty looks like - the mud huts, the charcoal fires burned inside for warmth, the dirt rivets of sewage running between homes.

To Get Involved

BeadforLife, (303) 554-5901; www.beadforlife.org
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