Knitting together new lives

People always remember the first dollar they made, but for Nar Rai, the memory is particularly poignant.

Rai, a married mother of three, arrived in Houston in 2008 after spending several years in a refugee camp in Nepal.

Originally from Bhutan, a country in South Asia bordered by India and China, Rai fled with her family to escape an oppressive government. In the 1990s, Bhutan moved to create a unified society and restricted religious freedoms. Everyone was required to wear the traditional clothing of northern Bhutan and the Nepali language was removed from schools.

Rai and others in southern Bhutan, considered ethnic minorities, fled to refugee camps in Nepal and India. Within two years, more than 120,000 Bhutanese Nepali had fled the country. Though many of the refugees from the predominately Buddhist country are Hindu, Rai is Christian.

The knitting and weaving skills Rai learned as a young girl in Bhutan are part of her integration into her new life in America.

She is a member of Community Cloth, a program supporting women who want to create and sell indigenous arts and crafts. Most of the women served by Community Cloth right now are from Bhutan and Burma. The group would like to expand and serve refugees from Iraq and Africa as well.

All profits from sales of the goods the women produce go back to the artisans.

The Community Cloth is a multiorganization project among Catholic Charities, Interfaith Ministries for Greater Houston, YMCA International Services and the Alliance for Multicultural Community Services.

Quynh-Anh McMahan, co-founder of the Community Cloth, said every woman who joins the program receives $150 seed money to purchase supplies.

They receive monthly training — not in their craft since they're the experts — but in basic concepts and skills of how to be an entrepreneur in America.

Handmade items including woven bags, knitted scarves, embroidered linens, baskets and rugs are sold at local farmers markets, houses of worship and university campuses. Community Cloth organizes occasional open-house events with goods for sale; to be notified about events check out its Facebook page at www.tinyurl.com/communitycloth.

McMahan said they hope soon to sell online at Etsy.com, an open market for handmade goods.

So far, the women have netted more than $15,000 in sales.

“It was my first job in America,” said Rai, who in addition to learning how to speak and write English recently passed a state exam to become a certified nursing assistant. “The Community Cloth showed me a dollar.”

There are currently 25 women in the Community Cloth, all of them mothers, including 26-year-old Devi Subba. Some of the women make their handcrafts from home; some work together in small groups in their apartment complexes.

Subba, also a Christian, fled Bhutan in 1992, arriving at a refugee camp in Nepal with her parents, two sisters and one brother. There they lived together in a small bamboo hut.

She called on her childhood skills of weaving and knitting to supplement her family's income, earning less than a dollar a day.

In 2008, Subba arrived in Houston, seven months pregnant.

She said she cried and worried about finding work and making money to pay the bills — a common concern among refugees, McMahan said.

“It's difficult for anyone with a Ph.D. or master's degree to even get a job these days,” McMahan said. “Imagine being a refugee looking for mainstream employment when you don't speak the language, don't have any formal education, and your background is farming or homemaking.”

But they do have strengths — skills that make them artisans.

“Many of the women have fantastic handicraft skills,” McMahan said. “Weaving, knitting, embroidery … they are very used to working with their hands.”

Having settled into an apartment complex and resum ed her craft, Subba is now making more than a dollar a day.

Elliot Gershenson, president and CEO of Interfaith Ministries for Greater Houston, said Community Cloth women aim to be self-sufficient in about six months.

And there's a biblical lesson here for all of us.

“All of the faith traditions I've studied are about finding ways to help those less fortunate and to welcome strangers,” Gershenson said. “To keep parts of your fields untilled so the poor can glean on their own without being embarrassed is a biblical concept for both Jews and Christians.”

The Community Cloth formally launched in December, McMahan said, and is still in its pilot phase.

But, just like refugees when they arrive in America, McMahan has big dreams.

“This was built from the ground up,” McMahan said. “We have the capacity to expand. Refugees will always be at the planning table.”