Sewing a Brighter Future

Sudarsih earns extra money for her family by sewing doormats, a skill she learned as part of Mercy Corps' Food for Work program. Photo: Mercy Corps Indonesia

Sudarsih, who recently graduated from the Mercy Corps food-for-work program, has had some experience with starting over. Originally from West Java, she moved herself and her five children to Jakarta twenty years ago after her husband's death, thinking she would have a better chance to support them all in the capital city. She briefly got a job in a factory, and then remarried. She and her husband, Timan, had two children of their own. Sudarsih now lives in Kedaung Kali Angke Cengkareng, and has spent the last year learning handicrafts with the Mercy Corps TAP skill program. Although she left the program in December 2002, she and her friends are still using their new skills in sewing and embroidering to create doormats.

Sudarsih is now 47, and still has two daughters living at home. Supporting both of her children is difficult for Sudarsih, considering she's unemployed and her husband is a subsistence farmer on land owned by the government. They live as squatters in a tiny woven bamboo house with a dirt floor, in a community considered technically illegal by the government. In most months, her husband will have two harvests, and the family can earn about $34. But the family expenses can sometimes run as high as $87 per month because they have to pay for clean water, electricity, school fees, daily meals and transportation costs for the children.

Because of that, Sudarsih sometimes must cut the costs of daily meals and using clean water; she sometimes even delays her children's school fees for more than three months, which she regrets. "I realize that my family's income is less than our need, so every month I try to adjust all expenses. And I never borrow money to cover the daily shortage, but sometime I have to borrow money from creditors to buy seed for the farm business," she says.

After living for years in poor conditions and without any job, Sudarsih was happy to participate in Mercy Corps' Food for Work program. Food for Work is part of the USAID-funded Transitional Activities Program (TAP), working with vulnerable communities in Jakarta. The program provides 50 kg of rice each month in return for 20 hours of work a week.

Sudarsih admits that the rice distribution was her initial reason for signing up in 2001 because she thought that her family would avoid food problems. In the Skills project, local trainers share craftmaking techniques, and Sudarsih's group has made many embroidered and sewing products. The Mercy Corps community organizer and local organization, Perkerti, also surveyed the local market and taught bookkeeping and marketing skills. Sudarsih was famed within the group because she usually brought her farm's produce to share during the trainings, and also because of her high motivation for learning compared with younger participants. Sudarsih said that she didn't know anything about sewing before she joined the FFW Skills project, and now she had learned many techniques, such as sewing table covers, doormats, and other items.

Her group has been especially successful with doormats, which can be sold for between 25 and 30 cents per piece. Many orders have flowed from neighbors, traders, traditional markets and families. It has inspired Sudarsih to know that even though doormats don't have high market price, making them can provide treasured resources and can increase her family income.

Right now, Sudarsih had graduated from the Skills project, but her willingness to maintain and to use the skill learned, and her longing to increase family income, has led her to remain part of the handicrafts group. Fifteen friends will produce doormats together even though they won't receive rice as payment any longer.

Sudarsih has the dream that someday she might open her own sewing business from her house. Then she could use the profits to buy rice or to pay her children's education costs because she doesn't want both of her children to drop out of school.

"Although I'm poor, I put education costs for my children as a priority. In fact, if I had the money, I would put my children into tutoring lessons after school," Sudarshi says.

But to reach her dream, she realizes that she must save money and earn extra income. She also knows that it will take a long time before her dream happens, but she is willing to work hard. The Food for Work Skills project has given her another new start.