The Business Behind Ibu

While standing in a remote mud-hut village in Timor, blooming with a vision of beginning Ibu, I peer admiringly into an open air workshop built by women in order to weave and dye and spin together. I feel the arms of children around my legs whose brothers and sisters headed off to college on their mother’s dime. I enter a new home built by the Ibu (chief weaver, alpha female) for a home-cooked lunch and touch the walls which shelter her family - a far cry from the huts down the dirt road. I know, at that moment, that I want to get money into the hands of women. So much good blossoms from that beginning. And I know, too, as I look at their exquisite skirts woven in ageless ikat techniques and dyed with the leaves of local trees, that I want to help preserve their extraordinary textile language, their local slant on beauty, by and for women.

Those are still my two goals for the work of Ibu: putting money in the hands of women and doing so by elevating their under-appreciated, under-paid skills of hand-crafted beauty. I chose to create a business rather than a non-profit to accomplish this, because women do not need hand-outs; they need work that pays. I want them to grow wise in the ways of business - learning to price their work and value their time, learning governmental regulations in order to export, figuring out quality control, starting credit unions to safely store their savings - to be savvy and strong and endure long after my work is over. And why not jobs which honor and utilize what they do best? Jobs which allow women to stay in their communities rather than be dislocated to work factories in over-populated cities; jobs which allow them enjoy their children as they weave, to belong to their larger families and tribal traditions as well? Just as I had always wanted work that grows organically from my very being, I want the same for them.