Muktagacha

Tuesday we were supposed to go visit another village that was about 3 1/2 hours away, but after about 3 hours we weren't even half way there. The traffic was stopped because millions of people in Dhaka were leaving the city to go to the villages to celebrate Eid. Our driver told us that if we were to try and keep going the whole trip would have been 20 hours! So, sadly we turned around. We were also told that the trip for the next day should also be canceled because of the traffic - we were so disappointed. This meant that we might as well fly home because we could not travel at all, we were ready to change our flight. But we got a second opinion and we were told to leave extra early - so we did and we made it! (Although there was major traffic on the way back, we arrived back at our guesthouse at 1am!)


This project was working on pineapple thread. Here she is weaving pineapple and silk threads together to make an expensive piece of fabric.


The threads of pineapple are only about a foot long so they HAND TIE each thread together, that's what makes this expensive!


The pineapple fiber in raw form.




Hand tying each thread...








We visited another paper project, Bonoful. These women were talking to me in Bengali and pointing at my camera, so I took a picture of them. When I showed them the photo on the camera they laughed so hard, it was great!


Making marble paper, genius.


They used left over cotton scrap from mills to make cotton paper. These women are cutting the scraps up.


My favorite project was the Sacred Mark. Women who want to leave their form lives of being prostitutes come here to work. They are put through a year of training on how to enter into a normal life again, and they are trained on how to make natural soaps. It was very, very moving being there. More here.