ARTICLE - JEWELRY MADE FROM TRASH

JEWELRY MADE FROM TRASH GIVES HAITIAN PARENTS HOPE
(KSC) - By Jesse Hyde

PORT AU PRINCE — Not far from the bustling downtown of Port Au Prince, tucked away on a quiet hillside strewn with trash, Makaline Theodor is doing what single mothers do everywhere: trying to find a way to make ends meet.

Two years ago, she was out of work and out of luck, and so she sat down here, at what she thought was an orphanage, planning to give up the nursing child she could no longer feed.

But as luck would have it, it wasn't an orphanage. It was the home of an American woman named Shelley Clay.

"It was Christmas before the earthquake," Apparent Project Director Clay said. "With a baby in her arms, she was covered head to toe in scabies, hunched over, carrying her baby, baby covered in scabies and she thought I was an orphanage."

Clay had come to Haiti three years before to adopt a child and had never left the country.

"I thought, man there's just a big ethical dilemma all the sudden of me spending $20,000 on this adoption when this mom would really like to keep her kid," Clay said.

So Clay came up with an idea: what if she could create jobs for mothers and keep families together? The result is the Apparent Project, a business that gathers trash from the streets of Port Au Prince and turns it into jewelry.

Trash like cereal boxes, which would otherwise end up in landfills, is being chopped up and turned into jewelry at the Apparent Project. Over the last two years, 220 artisans have been able to keep their children out of orphanages, build homes and keep their families together, thanks to the jobs the project provides.

Each piece of jewelry tells the story of the artisan who made it. Those who work with the Apparent Project earn three times the minimum wage in Haiti, and also get a cut of the sale once the jewelry they make sells through partnerships with stores like The Gap and designers like Donna Karan, who make bulk orders.

"As you can see, they're allowed to bring their kids with them to work, they get fed while they're here," Clay said. "If they bring their kids to work with them their kids get fed too, so it really makes it so there's no reason they would have to go to an orphanage.

It's hard to measure the difference Shelley has made in Haiti, but you can see the beginnings of change in tent cities, where artisans see Theodor as an example. She used to live in a tent, with all five of her kids huddled under her bed to stay warm, but now she has a house of her own.

"Makeline will tell me, 'It's all because of you that I have this' and I'm like, 'No, I didn't sit down and work that hard," She's the one that did it," Clay said.

The transformation of trash into jewelry, of something forgotten into something worth a lot, isn't that much different from the transformation Shelley says she has seen in the situation of the 220 people who work for her.

"My motivations come from a faith perspective, that we were all created to be creative people, made in the image of a creator," Clay said. "When we are productive and creative and taking care of ourselves, I think we're being who we're supposed to be.

Perhaps the best way to measure the difference Clay has made is in the face of Stefanie, the baby Theodore once considered giving up to an orphanage.

"When you give people the opportunity to rise up and be who they're supposed to be, and it's you know, something you can never give. It's something that has to come from themselves," Clay said.

Theodore plans to marry soon to an artisan who also works at the Apperent Project. She dreams that her children will become doctors and lawyers, someone big, she says, so that one day, when she's old, they will be able to take care of her.