where'd you get those beads?

Actually, they're seeds. Our Jewelry Collection is an eco-friendly selection of necklaces crafted from natural materials. Our beads are actually seeds collected from the bush surrounding Gulu Municipality. Wawoto Kacel artisans earn extra income by gathering the seeds and bringing them in for production. Like any natural materials, the seeds are seasonal.

After collection, the seeds are inspected and then drilled to make room for the cord used to make our necklaces. Even our necklace closures are crafted form seeds-turned-beads.

Have you heard of the famous Jacaranda trees lining the streets of Johannesburg, South Africa? They shower beautiful purple blooms on the streets during Jacaranda season. Our Jacaranda Blooms Necklace is made from the unique seed pod left behind after the flowers fall.

Other seed varieties include Eucalyptus and Mahogany, and others are known only by their local names - like Kilara - pictured above left (Kilara Spiral) and Lajok Ocol (Ebony Strands). Our Moonlit Nile Necklace (right) combines all different varieties with the sparkle of glass seed beads.

Learn more about the artisans who make our Jewelry Collection here.

artisans: wawoto kacel

kilara spiral necklace, $12 (left)

This fall we added a gorgeous new line of jewelry to One Mango Tree. All of the pieces incorporate seeds, cord and recycled materials, creating a unique look you won't find anywhere else. So, where did we find this beautiful jewelry? In a small shop on a dusty and otherwise empty street in a tucked away corner of Gulu.

Each piece in our Jewelry Collection is made by a local cooperative called Wawoto Kacel. The group is based in Gulu District, and employs about 160 members working on a variety of crafts. Like our tailors, the members of Wawoto Kacel have been negatively affected by the war in Northern Uganda. Many are disabled, single mothers or widows, and many of the members are also HIV+. Wawoto Kacel, which means "walking together" in Acholi, is an income-generating project that is part of a larger effort by Comboni Samaritans, an Italian NGO that has been present in Gulu for over ten years. Wawoto Kacel is now entirely run by Ugandan staff, and its members earn an income for the sale of their craft work, which is sold locally and for export, and also receive complimentary health care at the Comboni clinic.

wawoto kacel artisan working on beading (left)

Comboni Samaritans also offers additional outreach and programs to benefit the members and the surrounding community. The cooperative includes several sections. We currently purchase from their jewelry section, but they also do weaving, banana fiber note cards and nativities, embroidery, and hand-dyed fabrics, and tailoring.

road trip: organic herb farm

It'd been a while since my first visit to Happy Herbs - the 100% organic herb farm on the shores of Lake Victoria where I buy dried herbs for One Mango Tree eye pillows. We were running low on our two scent varieties - energize (lemon balm, lemon grass, spearmint and peppermint) and relax (lavender, lemon balm, marjoram). The farm is on the road to Entebbe, so after dropping Zach and Anna at the airport, I took the bumpy road to meet with Ibrahim, the head gardener, to mix up some bags to carry up to Gulu.

I arrived following a rainy season shower, with deep blue-gray clouds on the horizon, and the overgrown driveway to the garden filled with pools of opaque orange water. The garden's paths wind in and out of tropical foliage, still dripping from the recent shower. I noticed a sprawling vegetable garden, with staked lima beans, beets and lettuces. Several plots filled with weeds - keeping the soil nutrient-rich for the next planting of herbs. I could hear the waves on the shore below - a garden on the lake (rows of herbs under tropical palms, right). When I got to the drying house, Ibrahim was just arriving - riding on a bicycle with his gumboots.

The drying house is lined with brightly colored buckets labeled using masking tape (Ibrahim, below, in the storage room). It reads like a giant-sized, encyclopedic spice rack: lemon basil, sage, cinnamon basil, rosemary, thyme, chamomile, etc. etc. etc. All varieties dried and also powdered for herbal remedies. Four ladies sat at a table with baskets of rosemary, picking the needles from their stems.

Ibrahim and I got down to business spreading out the herbs for our eye pillows on the table, carefully scooping handfuls and bringing them to our noses to measure the scent.

"Ah, the mint is too strong. Add more lemon grass," he suggested.

Happy Herbs was started by Marion Boenders. Her other occupation is running the Wagagai Clinic. Wagagai is a huge greenhouse, exporting cuttings to Europe. The Clinic serves the workers and surrounding community. But really, Marion's pride and joy is the organic herb garden. She showed up while Ibrahim and I were packing the herbs, and we headed off to have some lemon cake and herbal tea (which she sells locally in Kampala). She added chamomile to mine to "chill me out."

...perhaps we should consider adding chamomile to the next round of Relax Eye Pillows. I certainly left Happy Herbs feeling, well...happier.

what is an IDP camp?

IDP is an acronym - it stands for "internally displaced persons." Most people are familiar with the term "refugee," and IDP is similar. An internally displaced person is someone who is forced to flee their home. Unlike refugees, they remain within their country's borders.

During the conflict in Northern Uganda, two million people were forced to leave their homes and resettle in camps - now called "IDP camps." The idea was that bringing people from their villages to these camps would better enable the government to provide protection and services. The conditions in these camps, which were never adequate, deteriorated drastically over the course of the conflict. At its height, almost the entire Acholi population in Northern Uganda lived in camps - lacking food security, jobs and protection.

After signing a cease fire and years of peace discussions in Juba, people began to feel more confident and move back to their villages. Resettlement is now a large concern in the region, as people return to villages with a lack of water points, roads, schools, and clinics - all destroyed by the war.

Many of One Mango Tree's tailors are from IDP camps - namely Unyama and Bobi, where we held a tailor training program in 2008 (photo, right).

To learn more about IDPs in Uganda, or to learn more about the conflict in Northern Uganda, check out some of these great online resources:

Francis Deng's Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement - outlining the definition of IDPs
Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre: Uganda (now estimates 710,000 IDPs remaining)
Resolve Uganda - great for advocacy efforts and updated reporting from the region
Enough Project - another great project raising awareness and advocating to end genocide and crimes against humanity

photos by Glenna Gordon

a message from summer intern: josh engel

submitted by Josh Engel, who interned for One Mango Tree during summer 2009

I'm currently an MBA candidate studying Social Enterprise at Kellogg School of Management. Before starting school, I came to One Mango Tree to engage in the growth of a business which was designed to maximize on social impact. I examined OMT's Uganda operations, from production processes to the flow of management tasks. I worked with Halle to design solutions to bottlenecks and inefficiencies, eventually supporting the launch of One Mango Tree's fully functional training and production site. I also worked to weave One Mango Tree's core social objectives, focused on improving the quality of life of the people of Northern Uganda, into demand-driven growth strategies. Prior to One Mango Tree, I worked in Refugee Resettlement and for an innovative private-public partnership in Chicago workforce development.

I really miss One Mango Tree and thinks of Gulu often! I've attached a photo of me eating lunch with a friend in front of Lucy's market stall.

Interested in interning with One Mango Tree? Send an email to info@onemangotree.com.

from seed to bag - we did it

The upper balcony at Good African Coffee at Lugogo Mall is usually filled with people who "work from home." They have free UTL internet, and the place has gotten so popular that you end up sharing a table with three strangers. It's a mobile office of sorts, and they have great cappuccino.

One rainy afternoon, Gihan showed up to do some work and plopped a stack of fabric swatches on the table.

"Do you like any of these? I know this guy, and he can turn any PDF into a print for you. He normally does t-shirts for me, but he makes a lot of these fabrics."

Many of the prints were gold on a solid backgroud, or printed on a textured, non-cotton fabric, but i was intrigued - they were intricate and the lines were all really crisp. Could this be the way out of the Chinese trap?

A few weeks later I drove Zach and Anna up to Gulu. One of their first tasks as OMT volunteers was to help me pick out some graphically interesting [Chinese] kitenge. It was difficult to ignore some of the obnoxious colors and polyester fabrics, but we chose for design and design alone. Back at the workshop, we photographed the repeat of the design and Zach loaded it up onto Adobe Photoshop. After playing around with pantones, we stood back and admired our work - we'd created four gorgeous designs.

After emailing them to Gihan, we got a response back from Herbert Musisi, the owner and lead designer at Chui Designs - a textile printing workshop based in Kampala. The following week I sat down with Gihan, Herbert and Alison to talk about our designs.

We agreed on 100% Ugandan cotton - a fabric called "Jinja" - named for the place where it is created - at Nytil factory in Jinja, the source of the Nile. All the fabrics are hand-dyed to our specifications, and Chui creates custom screens in our prints.

The result? We have bulk materials with custom colors and designs - a 100% cotton, 100% Ugandan product, from seed to bag. We did it!

Check out the new products this holiday season - coming soon to our online retail store.

the chinese man behind the waxprint curtain

When One Mango Tree began, we were small enough that I could waltz around Gulu market, plucking six yards of each print of kitenge that I liked, and have some bags made out of it (see photo at left). As soon as OMT launched as an online retail business, I knew this wasn't going to work anymore. Even so, our small quantities made it easy to just find maybe 100 yards of a certain print at a time.

Then we started to grow. After connecting with Greater Good early in 2009, we needed 500 yards of each particular print to meet order quantities. I found myself going downtown to Nakivubo Mews every day to buy fabric and make sure they had enough of the prints I'd selected. I'd often take photos, get an order, and come back to find they were already gone within a few days. When we started selling wholesale and retail to Global Girlfriend, we'd stretched the local purchase model as far as it could go. You just can't get 1000 yards of one single print, no matter how hard the local vendors tried.

I don't give up easily, but after weeks and weeks of boda rides back and forth downtown with no success of finding bulk kitenge, I threw in the towel. And I wanted to know WHY?!

The origins of "waxprint" fabric dates back to Dutch colonial occupation in Indonesia. The Dutch learned about batik techniques from local artisans, and decided to adapt this technique with all the new gadgets from the Industrial Revolution. They started printing "waxprint," but it wasn't too popular in Europe. Instead they decided to explore the new market down south - the African colonies. Africans loved the fabrics, and dresses and suites made from the bright cotton prints became the fashionable choice across the continent.

African factories picked up on production, and the textile industry in countries across the African map flourished from production of the fabrics.

And then China stepped in. African factories could not compete with the Chinese knock-offs coming in by the container-load in Mombasa (right) and African markets were filled with imported prints. The prints come in 12 yard sections, piecemeal and ready to be bought by budding tailoring businesses to create African garb. Each bale could have hundreds of different prints, making it virtually impossible to sell the fabrics in bulk. And at a price of only $1.50 per yard...no one can compete.

I find it disheartening to walk through African markets seeing row after row of cheap Chinese-made products - cups and plates and lanterns that often break after one use. How cheap is cheap anyway? And to realize that our authentic African bags were really Chinese-made fabrics... it launched me on a campaign to find a seriously authentic fabric for our bags - even if we had to find an artist and make it ourselves.