How the Project Works

Some background on the villages

Initially the project included only 20 women from the village of JiGaiZe. This village is a resettlement village, built after an earthquake in 1995, which destroyed many of the villages in the area. Six villages were combined to create JiGaiZe, that now is home to 225 families. The village is about 4 ½ hours north of Kunming. The last 1 ½ hours are driven on cobble stone roads which extend high into the mountains. The village is visited about 10 times a year for two to three days at a time.

Danyun has expanded the project to include women from 12 additional villages. These villages usually have less than 50 families and some can only be accessed by hiking up into the mountains. Families usually have half an acre (1/12 of an hectare) or less on which they grow corn in the summer and wheat in the winter. Other crops include potatoes, buckwheat, and turnips. The villages are too high in elevation or to dry to grow rice. Any income that the villagers may receive is from the sale of excess farm production, usually corn, or from money earned doing labor on construction projects in the city.

How the work is organized

The project now includes 220 women from four different nationality peoples. They are organized in small groups, each group with a leader. These leaders receive special training and instruction which they, in turn, pass on to the group members. By working together, the walls of division between the different peoples have slowly come down. The women see the need to help each other and to support one another. They are also earning more respect from their husbands who are helping around the house so they can have more time to do their embroideries.

There is a great potential for lives to improve

Most of the countryside women have never attended school. As part of the project the women also receive training in literacy, hygiene, nutrition, and money management. Night schools have been started and if a woman is in the project she is strongly encouraged to go. The school meets two nights a week and the women are taught to read, write, and do mathematics.

The money management training helps the women to see that the money they make can be used for many things, not just the instant gratification of buying candy for their children as we saw at first. Some of the women have come together to form a "folk bank". This is a savings method where a certain number of women, usually six, commit to putting a part of their monthly earnings into a common pool. Each month a different woman gets to draw from the pool. At the end of six months, if there are six women in the group, each woman would have gotten an opportunity to draw from the pool. More