Superstar Ugandans and paper beads
29th September 2006
Rose is cool. Rose is a wonderful lady from
Northern Uganda. She runs a craft group that makes beads from
paper. She makes trips every month or so to Gulu in Northern
Uganda and collects the beads from the ladies.
Click here for an example of the types
of things Rose makes.
Gulu is the place where thousands of children flock to every day to
avoid being kidnapped and forced into joining the LRA rebel group.
Some of you may have heard about it via the Invisible
Children campaign.
I was mentioning to someone that I wanted to construct
a website that will enable African women to sell their crafts.
They then put me in contact with Rose. Hippy
Chick and I went to pay Rose a visit.
Rose lives in a little garage in the town of Jinja (the town where I
was based for my white water rafting
experience). She rents her house out to some Ugandan students.
Rose showed us how you make paper beads. The basic principal
goes like this:
- Take a long thin triangular piece of paper
Maybe thirty centimeters long with a one centimeter base. Poster
paper is best.
- Roll the paper into a tightly packed spiral
- Apply a little bit of glue to keep the spiral together
- Soak the bead in varnish and allow to dry
Repeat this step three times for best results
And you're done! Pretty easy really and not too time
consuming. The colors of the post paper give the beads an interesting
color. I was so impressed with the paper beads that they are
going to the main thing that we sell on our site. Items like this
and this are just too damn bulky to post.
We asked Rose if she wouldn't mind coming out to some villages with
us and showing some ladies how to make the beads. She said - in a
very non-African way, "I can't come today. Is tomorrow
okay?"
Lee and I were very impressed with her enthusiasm. Rose is
coming out to a village with me in the very near future. Lee
and I traipsed the streets of Kampala and got all the materials needed
to make beads.
Stay tuned for more adventures in bead making!
Questions? Comments? Try contacting
me.
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(c)
2005 and 2006 Malcolm Trevena.
All the stuff on this site is written by me, Malcolm Trevena. Feel free to
link to this page. Heck, you can even copy stuff from here if you
want. Just make sure you sight me as a reference.
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