US Embassy Craft Fair

Our final project as Peace Corps Volunteers in South Africa is upon us! We just got the official invitation to attend the US Embassy Craft Fair as vendors and sell the Palala Clubs' aprons.

November 14th, Brandon and I will be traveling with our two founding PGC leaders and fellow Peace Corps Volunteers, Paul and Jess, to Pretoria where we will participate in a four-hour craft fair being held on the U.S. Embassy's lawn.

The women have been sewing aprons every day after school and despite the orders that continue to roll in daily, they have managed to accumulate quite a stock of aprons for this sale. It is our hope that by the time we are ready to leave the village and travel to Pretoria, we will have an excess of 250+ aprons to sell. At this point, we have half that amount sewn with production reaching a maximum of 50 aprons this past week.



Currently, the Palala Clubs have sold almost 250 aprons since its conception in late June 2008 and this sales event is set to double our numbers!

For those of you who are new to this project and have not heard us mention it before, the Palala Club Apron Project was created to ensure the future sustainability of the HIV/AIDS education and prevention project we started in April 2007 called Palala Clubs. It began with just 42 Grade 6 & 7 girls in our host village of Kgobagodimo and 2 female leaders, but through the assistance of Jess and Paul, expanded this last year to reach over 5 different communities affecting over 130 girls and 19 leaders! The Palala Clubs even began a division for Grade 7 boys this year!

With the US Embassy sale in the near future, it has been exciting to think about the large profit that we will be able to earn and just how much of that money will be able to go towards purchasing new supplies for next year's clubs. More children will be able to benefit from this program and there will be an even greater sense of ownership knowing that the funding is coming from their own locally produced project.

In addition to the quantities of aprons being sewn by the leaders, this week we put a lot of emphasis on the quality. Up to this point, there have been primarily two women sewing all of the aprons who do an outstanding job and are examples of perfection in their work. They have full-time teaching jobs plus their responsibilities of leading the Palala Girls Club, but in spite of this, they spend the majority of their free time sewing aprons to raise money for the continuation of clubs next year! These women have amazed me! With their dedication and knowledge of the apron project, they have been able to work unsupervised on the aprons since June earlier this year.

Now, however, because of the increase in business, we have been busy preparing more women to join the sewing force so that our productions can keep up with the demand. With this step towards expansion, we are emphasizing that the quality must remain the same from one person to the next, and therefore, I spent much of this week encouraging and working one-on-one with a leader who was new to the PGC this year. While she has attempted to sew just a couple aprons over the last several months, she never quite gained the confidence and knowledge to feel adequate when sewing mass amounts. This week though she made leaps and bounds in her sewing ability and feels right at home now joining the other two women in the media center after school to sew. While her speed is not nearly what the other two women are capable of, she has perfected her sewing technique and can match the quality we encourage. She has gained complete confidence in her ability to sew and feels much more comfortable now working on various sewing machines since she understands their functions in a new way.

Furthermore, this week, these three women mentioned above have been asked to run an apron training session in Seleka with the Palala North Girls Club leaders. This will be their opportunity to share their knowledge with peers and possibly expand the sewing force even further. Besides the comradery shared by the women, all being full-time teachers and Palala Club leaders, they now have this hobby of sewing which not only benefits the sustainability of the clubs but also provides them with a small profit from each apron sold. During this projected meeting, it will be the responsiblity of these women to share the successes of this project with their peers and demonstrate for them the quality of production that is expected for aprons to be marketable.

It has been an exciting couple of weeks and I will be sure to post an update after this Tuesday's meeting.