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View all search resultsThe less fortunate
Just a couple of kilometers away from verdant hills of bamboo forest, a family of ten weaves bedeg or bamboo matting and tape boxes
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J
ust a couple of kilometers away from verdant hills of bamboo forest, a family of ten weaves bedeg or bamboo matting and tape boxes. Tape is a type of food made from cassava.
The head of the family is Nenek Gusti Putu Nyelem. At more than 90 years of age, she should be resting, but daily weaves bamboo matting. One meter square earns her Rp 5,000, or a little over 50 US cents.
“Nenek has been weaving every day since she was a little girl. We all weave bamboo,” explains 60-year-old Gusti Nyoman Sabu, who carries a four-year-old child in her arms.
“We are very poor. We don’t even earn enough each day for a kilo of rice. Like Nenek, we earn about Rp 5,000 a day, it’s like that for all of us,” says Sabu, adding that only two members of the family can read.
“My son and granddaughter can read, but we never learned,” she says as the rains begin and their backyard becomes a swamp.
The family is carrying on a tradition of bamboo weaving that goes back generations, however they have never learned to improve or value add to their weavings to increase their income.
“We don’t have any land, we only learned to weave the bamboo. We don’t get orders. We just sell from home, so it’s just luck if we sell our products each day,” says Sabu, whose family, despite living so near the sustainable bamboo forest that supports others so well, continues to live in desperate poverty.
