On the road, part 3

Having seen the beads, we spent the morning learning about how they are made. It is a laborious, multi-step process that seems wholly out a scale with the price they fetch. We start at the home of Grace Adjimir.

You can find her by leaving the dirt road and following a narrow path through a field of corn and cassava until you come to a grove of stunted palm trees. You know you’re getting close when you begin to notice on the ground bits of broken glass and pieces of the clay forms used to make the beads. You also see discarded razor blades. These, we are to learn, are used to cut the cassava stalks that make the holes for the beads.

Grace’s office is a patch of red earth beneath a simple thatch roof. Here she and her nephew spend their day pounding bottles into powder, pouring the powder into forms and stoking the earthen kilns that then fire the powder into beads. When done, the beads are polished by hand against a stone. It is a process that can hardly have changed for generations, which is borne out by the deep groove in the stone.

It is hot, and the ovens spew out the acrid smoke made by the melting bottles. But no one seems to mind. They go about their business with an unhurried precision. Everything is fine. They have orders. Against the wall sit sacks full of bottles. They are healthy enough to work. This is success.

Edna Kwame, the first of the women to partner with Global Mamas six years ago, is doing well for herself. She is young and carries a confidence in her stride as she moves from the oven to the small stool where she sits to paint the cooled beads.

We make more of all this than she does. To her it is just making beads; it is what she does. It is, very likely, what she will always do. In this way, it is little different than getting up in the morning or eating fried plantains or laughing, which she does often.

“Edna is an industry all on her own,” Renae says. “She can fill orders no matter how big and is always on time. I don’t know how she does it.”

Edna pretends not to listen as paints tiny suns on a row of beads, but I can see that she is smiling.

(Picture: Edna Kwame at work)