Bilum has helped women in Mt. Hagen to have hope in their life

by CATHERINE WILSON

(THE JAKARTA POST - extracted from Keith Jackson's PNG Attitude blog) 

IN Mt. Hagen, a city high up in the valleys of the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, a group of local women, many of whom are HIV positive, have begun a self-help initiative to achieve dignity and a better standard of living.

Many live in informal settlements on the city’s periphery and confront daily struggles with poverty, drugs, family violence and inter-clan conflict.

A bilum made by a woman from Western Highlands Province.
 Image: Elizabeth Bonshek / 2007.

Established in 2007, the Mt Hagen Handicraft Group consists of 50 women, of whom 25 have AIDS, all facing social and economic hardship within the community. Handicraft coordinator Barbara Pagasa spoke evocatively of the women’s lives.

“Life is a dream of hope and many think and wish if only an angel from above could rescue them from this life of struggle that is hidden deep inside their hearts,” she said.

“A fear of hunger, sickness and death awaits and creeps quietly into their minds, thinking if I don’t wake up as early as 5am during the first breaking of the day, looking for twigs, empty cartons to cook breakfast, God knows what.

“If I don’t do it, then who else is going to do it?” she asked. “This has been their day to day struggle to meet their basic needs and to have a decent plate of food on the table each day.”

In a nation where women are significantly underrepresented in decision-making roles and suffer from a high maternal mortality rate, AIDS is another cruel burden. According to the United Nations Development Program, “gender-based violence affecting women and girls has reached unprecedented levels making them vulnerable to contracting HIV/AIDS.”

A Southern Highlands Provincial Flag bilum design made by a mother from Western Highlands Province. Image: Meri Hagen / 2017.

In 2009, the National Aids Council of Papua New Guinea reported that 34,100 people were living with the disease, approximately 0.9% of the population, with 60% of reported cases located in the highlands. Women comprise 56% of known cases.

The group’s aim is to empower women through self-generated incomes and a physically and psychologically supportive environment and, thus, to “make a difference to women by improving their ways of living and ability to escape the traps of these crises.”

The first aim is achieved by developing the skills of women in sewing and the designing and making of bilums, versatile and unique string bags that have become cultural icons of PNG. 

Every week Julie makes her way to the handicraft group’s offices situated behind a busy bakery in the centre of Mt Hagen. In this sanctuary, away from the grinding noise of trucks on the main road and endless hustle of roadside market stalls, she finds peace in the women’s quiet industry and gentle friendship. 

Ten-needle bilum pattern from Western Highlands Province.
Image: Sodua Jexu Sparks / March, 2017.

Julie has been living with HIV for nine years, ever since she contracted the virus from her husband who had had multiple sexual partners. “My husband died nine years ago and I have two children I am responsible for,” she said.

In addition to the economic challenges of being a single parent, Julie has been ostracized by her family because of her HIV status.

“When my husband died, my family did not want to go near me or drink from the same cups or eat from the same plates,” she recounted. “Even now, when I visit my relatives, they make sure the utensils I use are kept separate from the others.”

“With the bilums I make and sell, and with the money I get, I buy school fees and food and medication,” she continued.

Bilum sales on display in Mt. Hagen. Image: Meri Hagen / 2017.

But the support and friendship of the women in the group is priceless.

“Now that I have joined the group, I have lots of friends and I’m very happy,” Julie said. Within the handicraft group, she is also a member of True Friends, a core group of HIV positive women who focus on counseling and companionship.

Seated on the floor, another handicraft group member, Akumele, was looping a beautiful bilum featuring a kaleidoscope of brilliant colors interwoven with green threads. “These are our colors,” she declared. “We are a mixed people, and then the green is our environment.”

Bilums are made by a method of string looping or crocheting, which produces a bag which is both strong and elastic. 

“Traditionally, all mothers make bilums with the bush material fibers and use them for going to the gardens and carrying their crops, garden foods, back to the house, and there is another one for carrying babies,” the handicraft group’s executive, Wendy Puma, explained.

“There is also a bilum for when young girls want to go and get married. They have a special traditional bilum that they have to carry to the groom’s house.” Bilums are also used at funerals, feasts and cultural shows.

Bilum sales at the Kagamuga International Airport. Image: Meri Hagen / 2017.

Today women have innovated, readily adopting ideas from contemporary fashion and using colored wool-based yarns to create new bilum designs.

According to Akumele, it can take one week to make a small bilum and up to one month to complete a large one, which might sell for approximately K30-50. Each bilum made by the group has a special “label”, three colored strings attached which symbolise “make-crisis-history”.

Eighty percent of the revenue from bilum sales is given directly to the women makers. The group also manages a savings program for members, so the women are able to conserve a percentage of their income for the future.

The Mt Hagen Handicraft Group is also looking to the future and planning to expand the scope of their project. Recently the organization has reached out to sex workers in the Mt Hagen area, inviting them to join, train in bilum-making and try an alternative source of income. 

By the end of 2012, the group hopes to have a total of 80 members by attracting vulnerable and HIV positive women from village communities in more remote areas of the Western Highlands.

A tourist and a local mother with bilums. Image: Google.

Splintered Feet and Overloaded Bilums - What is the development agenda for rural PNG women and girls?

by GARY JUFFA - (www.pngwoman.com) 

WITH aching back and sweat soaked brow, the Papua New Guinean village woman is a hard worker. Carrying an oppressive weight in her string bags (bilums), laden on her lean back, sometimes a pile on another, not unusually a sleeping infant perched atop, her cracked feet grip the gritty dirt road and doggedly she moves on.

Mawarero Woman, Rai Coast. Picture courtesy of Jeremy and Team at Finisterre Vision. www.pngwoman.com

Her back bent over she trudges over mountains, across flooded streams, treacherous winding mountain tracks, bare footed to and from her home, her garden, to the market to some event, determined and dutifully.

Her duty is to her family, her children, her husband, often times they do not see her plight, she is the unseen force behind their very existence.

In the early morning, as the first birds sing, she is up and about, stoking the fire, preparing breakfast for her children and her husband, gathering her vegetables to sell at the station or district market. Another long and hard day awaits her. She has accepted her lot in life. Her family has readily demanded it. Her society sanctions it.

Sometime ago she has had an opportunity to dream. Perhaps a brief interaction in a church run school, where she learnt basic reading and writing and numbers, remote vestiges of dreams, forgotten, a small bright light that slowly flickers as it dies, snuffed by grim reality and the somber and stifling acceptance of arranged marriages and adulthood. Often she has had to make space for her brother's, school fees being scarce, admonished as it were by her very gender, to the garden and rearing children and her dreams of perhaps being a nurse or teacher, as far away as the flight of a lonely hawk, flying above the dull gray sky on that dreary walk, as she, laden with the burden of existence, life having departed along with her dreams, keeps on keeping on…

A woman carrying her granddaughter in the bilum in Sydney, Australia.
Image: Arosame Wawe‎ / 2017. 

And she is expected to accept, whatever is meted out to her, rarely a word of appreciation, though often brutal reprisal is swift, for delays in tending to some chore or responsibility, whether she had mitigating circumstance, illness, tiredness, or not…. punished for disappointments, unfulfilled expectations and failures beyond her comprehension…her cut lips and battered face, broken limbs, dislodged teeth and blinded eye reminders of the unjust society she exists in…

Hope for a better life for her children are transmitted in her loving hands and the warmth that she miraculously exudes towards them, despite the grim circumstances of her situation, catering to their every whim, their laughter she revels in, their tears she wipes and their pain she tends away.

Many fortunate women take for granted the moments they have to spend time attending to their personal hygiene. Moments spent in front of a mirror, applying scented lotions, carefully arranging their hair and taking a moment to take in their presentation. They wear clean fresh clothes, use modern appliances and engage in some form of meaningful employment.

A girl carrying her Madang style bilum. Image: Monalisa J. Umbu / April, 2017.

The woman in the village is lucky to have a cake of yellow soap. Her employment is constant, sun up to sundown, she has no leave and there is no payment.

40 years after independence, while seemingly this young nation saw hope in the so called democratic freedom granted to it, the Papua New Guinea village woman, still trudges to and from, with her bilums full, her back bent, her hands full, her feet bare, her punishment real and her dreams just that – “dreams”…

Yes, it seems independence has come to our young nation… but that is hardly so for our womenfolk in many parts of Papua New Guinea…

Little children know that special items are kept in their mother's bilum.
In the photograph, the little child was checking for some coins (money) while her mother was watching. Image Credit: Meri Madang / Facebook / 2017.

A global documentary photo exhibition in Sydney signifies bilum from PNG

by CHRISTINA SUMMER 

ALWAYS bulging, because that’s their nature, string bags are almost a thing of the past, relegated to memory by designer totes and paper carrier bags. One of the few string bags I see these days is the orange one my daughter uses to stuff all the beach toys into. This week however I’m reminded of those capacious multi-purpose string bags known as bilums that are traditional to Papua New Guinea. 

The connection? The photographic exhibition Access to Life which has just opened at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum for World AIDS Day 2012. Sydney is the tenth city in the world to show Access to Life, but the first to add Papua New Guinea as a special regional component.

A PNG flag bilum design made by a woman from Tambul, Western Highlands Province. Image: Elizabeth Bonshek / 2007.

Created by Magnum Photos in partnership with the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the moving images that make up Access to Life have informed and touched millions of people around the world. A series of new photographs from Papua New Guinea have now been added to the existing case studies from Russia, Swaziland, India, Haiti, Vietnam, Mali, South Africa and Peru. Together, these images document the human catastrophe of AIDS and the campaign to make antiretroviral drugs available to all those who need them.

Photographs of Elizabeth Mulunga of Hela Province are part of this new Papua New Guinea section. In these images Elizabeth is shown wearing a vividly coloured bilum on her head, in the traditional manner. The bilum is also on display and Elizabeth is quoted as saying, ‘I make bilums and I have a little coffee…. I take medication every day. Lots of people have died but I have lived’.

In recent years, many women have preferred to use readily-available coloured commercial yarns to make their bilums. It’s easier, and also enables an extensive range of design opportunities and colour combinations. As a result, the women’s bilums (and other bilum-inspired bilumwares) have become distinctly marketable, rather than purely personal and functional items.

Women wear bilums across their foreheads as this makes it easier to carry their frequently heavy loads. Men usually prefer long- handled bilums which they wear over their shoulders, thus keeping their hands free for other purposes. Either way, for both women and men, there is now a definite contemporary swing away from eco-friendly plant-based naturally-dyed string bilums to the vivid colours of synthetic yarns that enable bright patterns and individual fashion statements.

• Christina Sumner is the principal Curator, Design & Society, Powerhouse Museum Collection Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences.
• Article extracted from https://www.maas.museum

Bilum is an item almost seen everywhere at every events and gatherings or just at a scene of everyday life. In this photograph, girls with their bilums on  a cultural day celebration. Image: Belinda Bulda /2017.

A girl with her bilum. Image courtesy of Bilasim Png Magazines /2017.

 

The bilum in this photograph has a design that is rare and unique. Image: Jeveca Kenny Mai /2017.