Turtle Tree’s first project: a collaboration with Fanm Veret.

July 2009: a women’s group in Verrettes, Haiti, formed a legal co-operative, becoming the owners of their own enterprise. The women have called themselves Fanm Veret, Wi Nou Kapab!, Creole for The Women of Verrettes, Yes We Can Do It!  The group makes several artisanal products (see Turtle Tree Store: McSocks and the Krik Krak Creole Dolls).

Ton Vriens, a documentary filmmaker and journalist based in New York, met the group of women in the small town of Verrettes for the first time in February of 2007.  Some of the women had tried to make a living with embroidery but there was no longer a market in impoverished Haiti for handmade products. The women asked the Dutch filmmaker to help them create new products and market these products in the United States.

The quest of the women of Verrettes led to the start of Turtle Tree, a Dutch foundation. Turtle Tree was initiated by three friends, Frank Bierens, Siebren Hodes and Ton Vriens, see also Board Turtle Tree, who were all working in television production and who were familiar with the scourge of underdevelopment in third world countries. Turtle Tree wanted to try a new approach to small-scale sustainable development. The products would be eco-friendly and meet the standards of fair-trade but at the same time they would be commercially viable. In other words, the marketing of the products would not rely on the charity aspect of the purchase. Charity is whimsical – one day it is there and the next day it goes somewhere else.

In order for the products of Haitian artisan groups to be competitive in the big world, Western design was brought in and mixed with traditional local crafts to create new products. Turtle Tree needed to find new ways of marketing these wares that would always be produced in rather limited quantities since they are handmade. In addition, the foundation committed itself to advocating and promoting the formation of worker-owned co-operatives, providing a model to other similar groups in building democratic workplaces that would become the social and economic backbone of their communities.

As a first step in the collaboration with the women in Verrettes, Turtle Tree organized a number of workshops, inviting designers and artisans from abroad to research and develop with the women possible new crafts and new products. In the harsh circumstances of Haiti, this was easier said than done. While some of the women of Verrettes had some background in embroidering, they did not have much experience in other textile crafts. Also, in Verrettes there is no electricity and only a few old-fashioned sewing machines.

Annie Arthur, a fashion designer from New York, introduced the women of Verrettes to the art of felting and they managed to create a line of felted jewelry. A second workshop, led by Ashley Helvey from San Francisco, a felt artist highly recommended by the internationally acclaimed Claudy Jongstra, taught the women to felt larger pieces, including some beautiful children’s dresses made of organic wool and with subtle plant-dyed colors. (See Turtle Tree Store coming October).

The women of Verrettes took to the felting courses with great enthusiasm. Felting is the oldest technique of making textiles. A simple process, it only requires warm water, soap, and lots of energy to massage the raw wool into the dense, sustainable material of felt. Turtle Tree came up with the idea of using felt to make sleeves for MacBooks and iPhones because the material is durable and provides perfect protection. After many prototypes and the input of several sympathetic designers — including Ashley Helvey and Mary Jane Marcasiano, the New York fashion designer — Fanm Veret and Turtle Tree were able to launch a new product handmade with love in Haiti: the McSock. The women of Verrettes have high hopes that this product will establish them as an artisan atelier and will provide them with the means to become a sustainable enterprise.

Tekserve, New York’s authorized Apple reseller and oldest Apple store in Manhattan, promotes the McSocks online and carries the McSocks in their flagship store on West 23rd Street, between 6th and 7th Avenue.  Mary Jane Marcasiano has ordered a special edition of the McSock with her logo worked into the felt. Ms. Marcasiano is featuring this and other products made by Fanm Veret on her website (www.madewithloveproject.com/haiti.html). In addition, she is raising funds to have Fanm Veret manufacture a series of toy animals for an American children’s hospital.

Susan Brown — one of the curators of Fashioning Felt, a Cooper-Hewitt exhibition that shows the use of felt from thousands of years ago till present-day high fashion –summarizes the attraction of this magical material: “Felt is disorderly, entropic, full of entrapped energy. Perhaps that is why the experience of touching it is so affecting.”
Ms. Brown was in awe with the felting technique of the women of Verrettes. In her blog on the Cooper-Hewitt museum website she wrote: “Fanm Veret is currently producing simple and beautiful covers for iPhone and iPod, 13” MacBook and MacBook Air …the quality of the fiber is very high, and the hand-dyed colors are subtle, [and] the finished products have a high level of refinement…”.

Fanm Veret has also ventured into making dolls, the Krik Krak Creole Doll.  Krik? Krak! is a Haitian storytellers’ ritual of warming up their audiences by asking “Krik?” and taking the collective response “Krak!” as their cue to begin to tell stories and jokes. These Creole dolls bring to life the stories the people of Verrettes tell each other and their children.

Emily and Allison Groupp, two artisans from upstate New York, worked with the women on the technique of doll making. Joke de Radder, a Dutch children’s apparel designer and new board member of Turtle Tree, helped with refining the dresses and making patterns. But the character and expression of each doll is entirely the work of a member of Fanm Veret, who all bring their own unique style to each doll. The well-read Dutch life-style magazine Happinez featured the dolls as: “Dolls with the soul of Haiti!”

In the meantime, Fanm Veret and partner Turtle Tree applied for a grant to organize training for the members of Fanm Veret in maintaining the status of a legal worker-owned co-operative and learning the basics of conducting a business. Representatives of the regional government of Andalusia in Spain, which finances several other projects in Haiti, met with the women in Verrettes and decided to invest in the Fanm Veret project.  The Spanish sponsors gave Fanm Veret a generous grant to pay for the expense of becoming a co-operative and to organize the necessary business training. Thanks to an introduction by Michelle Pierre Kalil, a Haitian-American living in  New York, Jean Reynald Iméra, regional director of Fonkoze, an American micro-credit bank in Haiti, and his colleagues Nirva Brutus Simeon and Mr. Maxo were willing to donate their time to conduct a series of seminars with the women in Verrettes and writing a guidebook on becoming a co-operative.

The women’s group has been registered with the Haitian authorities as an independent organization, under the acronym O.F.V. (Organisation Fanm Veret). The courses have changed the perspective of the women of Fanm Veret on becoming a co-operative. For a long time, they had been wary of this prospect. Many Haitian co-operatives in the 1990’s defaulted or failed due to conflicts over the management of funds. In Verrettes, where political conflicts have often ended in bloodshed, it was seen as wiser to delegate the management of the women’s group to outsiders. But the seminars by Jean Reynald Iméra and his colleagues opened the eyes to the advantages of working together and being in control of their work. Many of the women say it has changed their lives and that becoming a co-operatve has given them hope for the future.

Fanm Veret is on its way to become a beacon of self-government in their community. Already, community leaders from other villages have approached them for information on co-operatives. For sure, many problems and issues remain to be solved and more arise on a daily basis. The women make five dollars net profit on each McSock and Krik-Krak Creole doll but they have to produce and be able to sell approximately 500 items each month to make a living and sustain the twenty-five member organization. They are also looking into cultivating local organic cotton in collaboration with the farmers in Verrettes. This new project has not yet materialized because the farmers have been inflexible in the negotiations. But, as Elcina Désulmé, one of the committee members of Fanm Veret says with unfailing optimism: “Piti, piti, wazo fe nich li.” Every bird builds its nest piece by piece.