Ethnic crafts on sale at the Borneo Convention Center - Asia for Animals Borneo 2015

words: Dave Avran, images: Veronica Ng

In frigglive’s many years of experience in attending events in Sarawak, there are always fascinating stories just waiting to be discovered if we took the trouble to dig a little deeper on the fringes of what meets the eye.

Dig we dutifully did, and boy did we hit the mother lode this time – we found many social enterprises for noble causes.

1.   Helping Hands Penan

 

They were offering Penan crafts like exquisitely weaved baskets, backpacks, floor and table mats, bangles and necklaces, all handmade from raw materials from the jungle.

Backgrounder: To enable their children to grow with today’s changing environment, many Penans have relocated closer to town for their children to receive education in government schools. The expectant women of the tribe also benefit from being closer to the hospitals in town where they can receive maternity care and medical treatment.

Recognising their daily struggle, Helping Hands Penan was formed to highlight the tribe's difficulties in settling in the modern environment and to provide assistance in a localised manner. Their prime objective is to help the Penan children to receive continuous education in a safe environment and to create new opportunities of livelihood for their families.

More details can be found on their fb page here

2.   Catama Borneo

They were offering gorgeous artisanal hand woven stackable baskets and natural skincare products made wholly with raw, unrefined ingredients.

Backgrounder: the traditional plaited crafts of Sarawak have been practised for thousands of years, passed through the hands of generations of women. Using natural materials such as rattan, bamboo and bimban collected from the jungles of Borneo, the women take these natural materials and plait them into beautiful intricate designs.

Catama Borneo was formed in 2014, after realising that in modern times these plaiting skills are slowly dying out and in a generation or two this talent could be lost forever.

They have a huge love and appreciation for these crafts and realised that through assisting the rural craft women and introducing them to more contemporary design processes they could help to sustain this craft and enable it to be globally recognised as the ingenious and beautiful artisanal craft that it deserves to be.

To find more of Catama’s products, click here

3.  Heart Treasures Sdn Bhd creatively transforms unwanted stuff like old magazines into aesthetically usable items, in an ecological program designed to assist students with autism, cerebral palsy, the deaf/mute, slow learners, those with physical difficulties, orphans and single mothers.

Their products are hand crafted as part of a motor skills development and occupational therapy program designed to offer these kids career opportunities in the future.

You can read more at their fb page here

  

4.  Perkata Gallery (Sarawak Association For The Welfare Of Intellectually Disabled Children.) This is a non-profit charitable organisation and operates a school for mentally retarded children in Kuching.

To fund themselves, they produce and sell T-shirts with distinctive Sarawak and cat designs, souvenir bags, hats, aprons, scarves, special gift items and lovely recycled greeting cards and postcards.

Read more on Perkata gallery here

5.   AliJon Handcrafted Silver – John Ng’s exquisite fine silver pieces and his traditional Japanese “Washi” handmade craft items re no stranger to us and are in fact the main cause of our wallets divorcing us recently.

Backgrounder: we first came across him and his lovely wife Alice at the Borneo Jazz Festival 2012, where we wrote this piece on him.