By Olvira Ballo & Mery Mesah
Dear Connect Indonesia team & supporters in London,
Thank you for your continued support for our weavers here in Indonesia. We feel very privileged to be involved in distributing more glasses to our weaves here in Kupang and we hope to be able to distribute more glasses to many weavers all over Indonesia in the near future.
We are truly elated to have received 165 pairs of glasses in October and November this year and we are confident that these glasses will reach those desperate weavers soon. On Nov 27th2016, we have managed to deliver 31 pairs of glasses to a few small weavers group here in Timor.
The weavers’ groups we visited in November are:
- Kelompok Tenun Kampung Savu: This was our second visit to this group, Our first visit was on April the 5th 2015, where we only managed to meet 3 members at that time. We were very happy that we managed to gather more weavers on our second visit. They are located in Jl. Sesawi Kel.Oepura – Maulafa Kota Kupang NTT. The weavers here specialise in producing ikat/tenun using the pattern from Sabu/Sawu (major), Rote, Amarasi. Here weavers still use natural dye to colour the threads, but many of them are also using synthetically coloured threads.
- Kelompok Tenun Ternate: Ternate (a Small island in Alor Regency of NTT Province). We managed to distribute 2 pairs only during this visit, but we have rescheduled another visit soon so that we can distribute more pairs to those who need them most.
- Mrs Aquilina Sali from Kef was among the lucky ladies. We handed her a pair during her visit to Kupang city on the day, and she was truly grateful for the gits. Although she lives in Kefam, she travels to the capital fairly regularly to sell her woven cloth.
We are proud to include a few photos from this visit.
