Sewing the future: a ‘rebirth experience’ in prison

The 6-month Tailoring Course, attended by 21 young women detained
in Bale Regional Prison (in Ethiopia), has just ended

I’ve never been treated like this at home,
I’ve never had opportunities, not even in my family… I haven’t even gone to
school
“.

This is how R. expresses herself and never stops thanking and hugging us. She is 16 years old and is being held in Robe Prison.

She is one of the 21 girls who accepted the proposal to participate in the tailoring course that we organized in prison, in collaboration with the prison authorities.

The girls, most of them between the ages of 15 and 22, learned to use manual and electric sewing machines and to pack household linens, including bedspreads, quilts, doilies…

The prison provided us with two rooms: a larger one where we set up the sewing machines and a smaller space that we used as storage. The workshop included a shift in the morning and a shift in the afternoon… but some of the girls, increasingly interested, tried to attend the two shifts.

The room which has set up inside the prison for the training.

We realized that the girls, began to dress better and take care of their physical appearance by participating in the course. This meant that training opportunity was enriched with other meanings, it meant their growing in self-esteem, self-confidence, discipline and, moreover, cultivating a taste for beauty… admiring the artifacts that they slowly made, they could be aware their own beauty.

The master of the course, an artist from the area, was an important reference point and a great resource for everything to work at its best. He accompanied the girls with affection and delicacy: on Women’s Day, which is also celebrated here, he prepared a composition of flowers to pay tribute to the girls and embellish the workshop.

The six months of the course (from February to last August) were crowned by a concluding celebration where some public authorities were also invited to; the girls obtained a participation diploma issued by the education office that can be a resource to reintegrate into the world of work, once the sentence has been served.

This is precisely what we hope… that it may be easier for them to find work tomorrow, also because they will be able to look to the future with hope, more confident in themselves and their abilities.

At the end of the course, the girls could not stop thanking us and expressing affection… gratitude is also ours for such an experience of humanity and hope…

Step into the tailoring workshop and discover how these women are building their future…
Watch the full video.

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