Senanga basket weavers

Last week, my family (VIDEA interns & the boss) along with Mr. Norman Chavula had travelled to Western province to a district called Senanga. It was approximately 10 hours away, but we of course travelled on Zambian time, which was much longer. If you know of Indian time, you get my drift!

The main focus of the trip was to meet the Senanga basket weavers, who make these beautiful baskets and they receive fair prices for their work. We collect, and bring them back to Lusaka to be fumigated, (just in case there is spideys in them) and then we mail them off to Canada to be sold in farmers markets & festivals. The proceeds go back into VIDEA programs, and if you know about VIDEA’s programs through my past blogs, you know they have many projects between Canada and Africa.

VIDEA recognized the importance of selling the baskets in Canada. The women in Senanga are empowered economically through these initiatives. Senanga is quiete far away from markets to sell the baskets. In comparison to other districts in Western province, Senanga has high levels of poverty.

We got to meet the basket weavers and spend the morning with them. There was some language barriers as they spoke Losi (which I’m told is one of the most difficult languages to speak in Zambia) & I have weak Nyanja. My Bemba is ridiculously worse. But none the less, we communicated mostly through laughter.

The baskets are beautiful and you can only imagine the detail and the work that went into each basket. I was pretty happy to be able to put a face with the baskets because I had been hearing about the amazing work and how extraordinary the pieces were.