Actually, you made a difference!
Once upon a time, I had a Dutch friend in Addis. For some odd reason I often had very good Dutch friends in the past 10 years… We used to browse the shops and look for special crafts and materials. We used to help little girls at school to do craft projects. We used to have a lot of fun together. She started to develop an idea about using local colored plastic straws to make nice boxes of square and rectangular shapes. She had seen baskets locally made with the same materials in very pale and ugly colors. She found one man that made those baskets. She teach him how to combine bright and happy colors and started to try different shapes and sizes. They made sets of two or three increasing sizes that would fit inside each other. They also made A4 sizes useful to put papers and books. She reserved a room at the back of her garden were he would store the materials (she would finance in advance) and come everyday to weave. It was not easy to explain the color combination concept. It was either not easy to choose the length of straws to avoid unnecessary waste of row materials. It was even more difficult to be consistent and explain the concept of regular and standard sizes and quality. But slowly, this concepts started to make sense to him. At this point, they had dozens of different boxes of wonderful colors. She started to sell some to friends and neighbors. Friends that were going on holidays to Europe and wanted some gifts to take with them. It just happened that I was going to help selling various goods at a diplomatic bazaar, all funds to be donated to charity and we decided to try to sell some of her baskets and boxes there too. I was happy to try to promote them! We agreed that we would pay back the cost of the materials and the rest of the profit would go to charity. She made a nice business card with her phone number and a photo of the making of the baskets. The sale was a success! We took almost 100 pieces of various sizes and sold all! And people asked for more… And people took cards to make orders. We were very happy, so in the next handicrafts bazaar in town, we booked a table and decided to just sell the baskets and boxes. This time I was not alone selling, she also decided to join and showed her face. We sold many, not all, but quite a lot. As we were staying there the whole of two days we took some food to eat. We were also just starting a side food catering business so we took some samples, but this will be for the next story…!… Anyway, the baskets and boxes started to be well known and very appreciated. Suddenly and sadly, it was time for my friend to leave Ethiopia and we thought about the basket business and how could that be continued. Nothing was exactly sorted out and the guy that made them was a bit awkward and difficult to find. We could not understand why… I was sad, the organizers of the next handicrafts bazaar tried to contact me to know if we had more baskets to sale, friends regret not to have bough more boxes before. They looked so nice and good for so many uses!……… More than a year passed… Until the last handicraft bazaar, when I suddenly sow a few shy baskets hidden in a corner, in the middle of pots and lamps, that looked very much like those of my friend…! Until today, when I finally sow a whole lot of them on sale at a local shop near her house (where I used to go with my friend to buy wooden crafts) and I realized the impact of the little and bright idea of one friend that made a difference and planted a colored seed of change and improvement…
