By WeBuyItGreen:  promoting green living and fair trade

The factual information below about Little Works was provided by the company itself, a member of Coop America that has been certified by the Fair Trade Federation.

On an April day in Namibia, Sarah Paine, a Volunteer Service Overseas products designer, awoke to music.  A group of artists-in-training from the small San settlement of Ekoka were singing and ready to begin their workshop.  Sarah would be helping the group with oil painting and lithocuts in Etosha, Namibia’s largest game park.

Perhaps the oldest people in the world, the San occupied South Africa about 20,000 years ago.  PBS documented the significance of their art in the series, “How Art Made the World,” identifying striking similarities between the cave paintings of ancient Europeans and those of the San that were created as recently as 200 years ago.   Unfortunately, in the 19th and 20th centuries, the San nearly disappeared altogether, and their current small communities are impoverished and fragile.  In 2002, the Rossing Foundation and OMBA Arts Trust hit upon the idea of retrieving the rich San artistic heritage as a means of supporting the community today.  They started art workshops, employing people like Sarah Paine to facilitate them, and displayed San art in South African exhibitions.

Another project funded by the Rossing Foundation and the OMBA Arts Trust trains members of the Ononkali community in northern Namibia to make paper that can be used for gift cards.  The Onankali paper workshop uses a staple crop in the region, pearl millet, mixing it with recycled paper pulp to create a unique, fibrous paper that is then silk-screened with San designs. 
 
Little Works, a certified fair trade company in the U.S., buys special occasion cards from the Onkali paper workshop as well as from three other small suppliers working in the townships near Cape Town, South Africa.  Through their suppliers, they employ eighteen women from the region, paying their South African suppliers more than twice the minimum wage and providing desirable working conditions.  In addition, through donations to Deep Roots, a Seattle-based nonprofit, they fund a Girls’ Scholarship Program in Namibia.  This year, they sent three young women to the University of Namibia.

If you are looking for cards for a special occasion, you could add a bit more meaning to them by sending the story of the San along with your card.  You will be helping people like Tate Simon, who has been able to buy a corrugated roof for his house through the sale of his art, and Filimon, who at the age of fifteen, was able to buy a blanket to keep his mother warm during the winter.   Little Works provides an opportunity to support local artisans and their communities, and to help preserve what may be the oldest group of people on our planet.

You will find these beautiful cards at Little Works.  The Namibian cards and several of the South African cards are currently on sale at the gift shop at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in order to complement their “TxtStyles/Fashioning Identity” exhibit which runs through December 28.