Telling a Yarn

It's easy to get lost in Djibo. To new-comers, the streets may seem a labyrinth of mud brick and pot holes, punctuated by water pumps and mosques, every street adorned with discarded black plastic bags and millet husks left over from the pounding women. Even the not-so-new, like myself, are often disorientated by the new buildings that regularly spring up while others crumble away. The streets have no names and the houses no numbers; the town is merely divided into secteurs, each about as large as an English housing estate. It would be a nightmare for a postman, if there ever were such a person.

It has been something of a challenge, therefore, to start a new project for fifty women who live all over town. As well as keeping track of their names, I need to know how to find them and "over there, next to the lake" is typical of addresses I have been given (half the town lives next to the lake!).

This has come about as the organization SOS (www.sos-saveourskills.org) are enabling me to create work for women who can hand-spin organic cotton into yarn that will later be woven and sold in Burkina or exported. I am really pleased to be able to do this; my desire has always been to provide creative work for women who are so poor here, and this is an answer to prayer, even if I have to do it without an A-Z of Djibo. 

Spinning cotton into fine yarn is no mean feat and seems to be mainly the preserve of women over fifty years old. Although it was once something almost every Fulani and Mossi woman would do, hand spinning has been mostly abandoned as the market has become flooded with factory produce. I spent one morning with the lady pictured, trying to get the hang of it but barely even managed to spin the kewel on its end correctly (the stick onto which the yarn is spun). It is a special skill and the women know it; you should have heard the chatter and excitement the morning they came to collect the first installment of cotton. Steve said he thought the house was actually shaking with the noise levels they were emitting.

There is something wonderfully liberating about doing what you are good at and I am enjoying organizing work for these ladies who are in turn so glad to be taking up their old skills again. I believe that good, satisfying work is God-ordained, and in an ideal world it is something we would all have. I know we are not yet living in an ideal world, but sometimes I look around Djibo and try to imagine it restored as God would have it. In my mind I can see it; no plastic bags and no potholes, but plenty of mango trees, abundant water and lots of women spinning cotton.