No yarn: Young men do good with stitch in time

Uganda is proving ground
Last spring, the Krochet Kids decided the time was ripe for an international test of their concept. They decided to start out in Uganda, since co-founder Stewart Ramsey had previously volunteered there and he and other members had connections with other nonprofits working in Uganda, including Invisible Children, Ready explained.

The need also is great, since the east African country has been torn apart by an ongoing civil war that has lasted nearly 20 years, disrupting the economy and leaving many Ugandans without work.

“The biggest thing is that they just need jobs, they need a way to be employed,” Ready said. “It is another way out of poverty for them.”

Teaching the women how to crochet was the easy part, Crecelius said. The tough part, the group found, was being able to carry out their vision in a country with different customs and laws.

While Krochet Kids is recognized as a nonprofit in the U.S., it was not registered to perform charitable work in Uganda.

ENCARTA UGANDA: Maps, facts and figures

“We had everything planned, but once we got there, we just realized the pace of the culture and everything that happens is a little slower than we were expecting,” Crecelius said.  “It’s a process, and we have to figure out how we fit into that.”

The bureaucratic roadblock forced members of the Krochet Kids team to work with other Uganda-sanctioned nonprofits rather than independently. (Though most spent a month in the country, some are staying for an entire year to earn school credit as well as continue to oversee Krochet Kids efforts to obtain nonprofit status there.)

Working with the local Ugandan nonprofit Kica ber, Krochet Kids’ volunteers found nine local Ugandan women interested in learning to crochet and ended up with six participants for the one-week trial run.

Can volunteers master it?
“It was important to figure out if they could crochet,” Crecelius said. “We found out that they could. They were actually very skilled with their hands and almost everyone picked it up quickly. The first day, the woman I was crocheting with – Alice – made, like, a flawless hat. And by the third day, the majority were making almost flawless hats, so that was pretty cool. We knew that our program worked.”

The female participants were mostly young, between the ages of 15 and 23, and many were “child-mothers,” a term used to describe young females abducted by rebel forces and impregnated by their captors.

“It really brings into perspective why the people are how they are,” Crecelius said. “It’s just really humbling to see, and it made me so patient. (The women) are very quiet, just because of their experiences and treatment during their entire lives, but they’re eager to learn. And they came in every day smiling, despite everything going on around them.”

The women made about 20 hats in total, Crecelius said, all of which are currently sitting in his Spokane, Wash., bedroom.

Krochet Kids intended to begin selling hats over the Internet this fall, but the timetable has slipped to winter or next spring. Crecelius said Krochet Kids wants to be sure it can support itself financially and that it will have enough quality products before making them available for purchase.

In the meantime, participants in the charity plan to return to Uganda soon and are looking to expand the program into Spanish-speaking countries.

“We’ll see how the rest of this year unfolds,” Crecelius said. “We know that the programs works, now it’s just the process of figuring out how to help best.”

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