Little village baby, way up on the mountainside

So I’m back in the Philippines, and back at Stairway now, and can’t wait to get started back up on everything. This week Annie and I will be going up more often to Baclayan, a village about an hour long hike up the mountain where Stairway is building more facilities. After visiting a few cool stores in Manila, we began to think about how awesome it would be for the women in Baclayan to market their hand-woven baskets in Manila. As of now, the women simply wait for tourists to wander past their village in order to sell them baskets. This, however, is clearly not a reliable source of income for these women, so we are hoping to see what they think about creating a cooperative that could sell their products regularly.

The people who live in Baclayan are Mangyan people, part of an indigenous tribe here in the Philippines. They were forced to move from the lowlands up to the mountains and are continuously taken advantage of by the Tagalog people. A small example of an injustice that occurs is that the Tagalog people in Puerto Galera will buy the baskets from the Mangyan women at unfairly low prices in order to sell them to tourists for high prices. They make money exploiting the hard work of the indigenous women, who need the money much more severely.

We will be talking to one of the women, Ate Susan, first to see what she thinks about our idea.