...Heather's visit to The Gambia, December 2011
“This visit went beyond all my expectations. It was great, wonderful, magic,” said Heather on her return. At three weeks, this was Heather’s longest visit so far to The Gambia. It was planned that way so that she could spend the first week getting ready for the exhibition in the Alliance Francaise, the middle week hosting the exhibition and the last week sorting things out and running normal workshop activities.
Miriam, the twin sister of Rug Aid co-opted director Pam Bolam, was on hand to help Heather during the first week which went very quickly (although not quite as planned). During that week, the first four Rug Aid-designed prayer mats were created from scratch.
[Photo left shows one nearing completion.] Every Muslim prayer mat is roughly 2’ 6” by 4’ (75 by 120 cm) and one popular design features the onion-shaped dome of a mosque. There is also a box-shape in the centre of many rugs and the design often features a moon and a star. The basic design Heather drew was based on Ebrima Trawally’s personal prayer mat, and Heather is convinced that hooky prayer mats will sell in The Gambia because every Muslim must own a prayer mat.
Soon after Heather arrived in The Gambia, Ebrima had told her that he had good and bad news. She asked for the bad news first and was told that the Alliance Francaise had double-booked the exhibition space and, because the other people had paid the fee up-front, the five-day Rug Aid exhibition had been cancelled...
The good news was that the Gambian Chamber of Commerce’s Trade Fair would start on Thursday 8
thDecember and that, for £400, Rug Aid could have a stand for the ten days it lasted. Because this biennial event attracts many hundreds of visitors, normally including the President of The Gambia, Heather decided that it was too good an opportunity to miss. The other costs of the event came to £100 and Heather said that spending a total of £500 to promote Rug Aid locally was “well worth it.”
The Trade Fair, which takes place in the open air, was very hot and dusty but hundreds of people stopped to look at the Rug Aid stand.
[Photo right shows Ebrima and a helper hanging rugs while Ernest waits patiently to start rug-making.] Heather thought it was one of the best and most colourful of the 300 stands in the show. Ebrima helped Heather to prepare the walls of the open-fronted wooden stand by lining them with brown fabric. He then knocked nails into the wood (using a heavy ornament as they did not have a hammer) to hang the rugs. “It looked like a picture gallery,” said Heather. No furniture was provided so Ebrima borrowed a table and some chairs from the GOVI School. Ebrima also brought to the stand the sewing machine which Pauline Link donated a year ago and Heather used it every day to hem pieces of hessian for the rug makers. She also spent some of her time drawing designs for the rug makers to work on.
Every day two rug-makers, one sighted and one blind, joined Heather on the stand (travelling both ways in a taxi funded by Rug Aid). Heather gave them breakfast before the day’s work started as well as a meal of fish and rice later in the day.
[Photo left shows a sighted rug-maker and Babacou, who is blind, at work on the stand while Heather uses the sewing machine to hem hessian.] Despite her own belief in Rug Aid, Heather was genuinely surprised by the visitors’ interest in the stand: since her first visit to The Gambia in 2007 she has felt that blind Gambians are particularly stigmatised. However, her experience at the Trade Fair changed her mind about this: every day there were crowds of people at the Rug Aid stand, including school children. Many visitors asked Heather how Ernest made rugs, they seemed genuinely puzzled by his ability to carry out the work without sight. Her response was simply to suggest to the visitors that, because Ernest is an intelligent and articulate man, they could talk to him about it. Engaging with Ernest on a one-to-one basis made a huge difference to the way people perceived his disability, and he really appreciated the novelty of this experience: sadly, blind people are often talked down to as though they have learning difficulties and shouted at as though their hearing is impaired as well as their vision. At the Trade Fair, Ernest was treated with the respect he deserves as a talented rug maker. Heather feels that the event was an education about blind people for the hundreds of members of the Gambian public who visited the stand over the ten days the Trade Fair lasted. The very popular Ernest worked all day when he was there and, when he had a day off, Babacou took his place.
Almost every visitor wanted Heather to show them how to make a rug and most of the teachers asked her to visit their schools to teach the pupils. However, Heather has promised the visually-impaired people she works with that she will not teach any other Gambians in order that their work retains its unique appeal. Heather has noticed that everywhere you go in The Gambia you are offered similar souvenirs – beaded items, batik pictures and wood carvings. She has always been aware that rug-making is a very different activity to most of the crafts on offer to tourists and she is keen not to dilute the value of the work she is doing with the blind by teaching other people to make rugs. One young African girl visited the stand every day and sat watching Ernest as he worked: Heather knows that, eventually, someone will copy the idea of rug-making but she hopes that the Rug Aid trainees will always have a special following because of their visual impairments.
[Photo right shows a stilt-walker passing the Rug Aid stand.]
Fifty rugs were sold from the stand during the ten days of the show and several of the rugs could have been sold several times over, including the yellow monkey made by the completely blind Babacou.
[Photo left shows Babacou's very popular Yellow Monkey
rug.] Any rug which featured an animal sold very quickly: a crocodile made by Ernest was sold to a local government body, and rugs with snakes were popular too. The most wonderful news is that Ebrima took an order book back to the workshop for duplicates of rugs to be made for disappointed buyers! The rugs sold included the four prayer mats, and rug buyers were Gambians as well as tourists. Some people bought more than one rug.
One of the 'multiple' buyers was from the Venezuelan Embassy: he bought rugs to hang in their new offices. Another person who bought lots of rugs was Anna who runs four very successful shops, based in hotels, which sell locally-made goods. And finally there was Alyssa, an American who is married to a Gambian: she bought duplicates of a wall full of already-sold rugs, so the workshop will be kept busy making rugs to order!
Every rug was priced: to start with, the most expensive ones were the prayer mats at 800 Dalasis (under £20) which Heather thought was cheap considering the quality of the work. However, Ebrima thought that price was too high and reduced them to 600 Dalasis. When the man from the Venezuelan Embassy was buying rugs he didn’t question the cost of any of them, and Heather feels he would have paid 800 Dalasis or more for the prayer mats! In future Heather thinks that, if the rugs are selling, the prices should go up and she says that this event gave her the opportunity to get the marketing right. "It was a fabulous learning experience," she said, which allowed her "to fathom out who liked what."
The stand promoted the recycling aspect of rug-making and the rugs on display included some which were made of used plastic bags. When Heather last visited the workshop (in March 2011) she told the students that they had to do a lot of preparatory work before the exhibition: on her arrival this time, she was delighted to find that they had done as she asked and that there was a stack of fabulous rugs ready for finishing off.
[Photo right shows a stack of rugs waiting to be taken to the Trade Fair stand.]
Many of the visitors asked where they could visit Rug Aid, where they could see the rugs being made. This leads into the second piece of news to come out of this visit (as if all that about sales of rugs and the way blind people are perceived wasn’t enough!): we have been offered the year-round use of one of the rooms which was previously used for admin by the GOVI School.
[Photo left shows the room we have been offered - there is even a lovely tree outside the entrance where rug-makers can rest in the shade.] This is possible because the school board is very short of money at the moment and is looking for tenants for parts of their building. Renting this room will cost around £1,200 for a year and we need to do some work in the rooms before we can move in, but having a permanent base in Serrekunde would be so very helpful at this stage in Rug Aid’s life. It would give us a location which people can visit to see rugs being made, and secure premises in which work can be both stored and sold. We will read the offer we have been made very carefully to ensure that we fully understand our rights and responsibilities before we sign, but it looks like a very good idea. Rug Aid has been associated with the GOVI School since our first exploratory visit in February 2007 and people associate us with the organisation and the wonderful work they do for blind children and adults, so it makes sense to continue that association. We will continue to keep an eye on the market in case somewhere perfect becomes available to buy but renting a room from GOVI is a very good immediate solution to a major problem. In the meantime, Ebrima has agreed to get a group of rug makers into the current borrowed workshop at the school if an important buyer wants to see the project at work.
