This post was originally posted on the Hill Tribers blog by my co-founder Caren and I asked her if I could share this with you. In addition to being a brilliant graphic designer, jewelry designer, business partner and jack (jill?)-of-all-trades, Caren is also a fantastic writer. I have cried every time I’ve read this post. I lived these hard months with Caren and it hurt so much to lose her precious mother to cancer. The world needs more women like Cheryl Frost–strong, determined, creative warriors who know how to enter the mess and love with abandon. Caren is a woman like that and she continues to amaze and bless me.

*****

Each Mother’s Day, we celebrate and honor the women in our lives who have made us who we are. It’s a day to say a heartfelt “thanks” for all the blood, sweat, and, surely, tears poured out on our behalf by our moms. As a mother myself, I look forward to the handmade cards written by my barely literate Kindergartner, the macaroni necklace handcrafted by my preschooler and, if I’m lucky, a long nap.

But it isn’t always the easiest day to celebrate for many of us. Last year, Mother’s Day came right on the heels of losing my Mom after a short (but fierce) battle with pancreatic cancer. (My dad shares more about her life and how it connects to the Hill Triber story here.) Everything about that first Mother’s Day felt heavy. Perhaps because I was 7 months pregnant with a girl who inherited a strong dose of fierceness from my mom.

Mother’s Day is not an easy day for those of us who have lost our mothers, or for those who have struggled for years to become mothers themselves, or for those who grew up with a less than ideal mother figure. But it’s a day we choose to celebrate each year with the Hill Tribers. All of our artisans (except our lone man, Htoo, of course) are mothers or expectant mothers. How they are able to fold their work into their mothering and how Jessica and I fold our mothering into our work is a key component of why we do what we do.

Our sweet Zadie Jo was born in July and she showed her fierce nature by crying through most of her waking hours for the next 4-6 months. My husband and I zombied our way through those intense days and nights. The next fall, as I juggled the effects of losing my mom and losing my mind over my colicky baby, we began meeting with the artisans once a week to prepare for Artreach. I would bring Zadie along. She would cry. I would tear up. Without fail, Nang or Huang or Heh Ler would take the baby and pace the floor, soothing her and shushing her and giving me blessed moments of respite. One night, Nang took a turn holding her. She fought off the others (elbows may have been involved) to spend some time with my fussy little girl. When she handed Zadie back to me, she said with tears in her eyes, “Her stomach hurts.”

I cried the entire way home. From the outside, this little exchange may have seemed insignificant, but the way she cared for Zadie reminded me of the way my mother would have. That small group of women rallied around me through some of my darkest days. Their love and affection and, at times, motherly pats and advice, buoyed my spirits beyond anything I’ll be able to express. There were no casseroles, floral bouquets or Hallmark sympathy cards. But I’ll never forget the sincerity and empathy in the eyes of my friends when I needed it most.

When I left class that day, I thought, “This is what community is.” In this community, women who have experienced loss which far surpasses mine reached out to me in my grief. In this group, mothers carry babies around on backs while creating stunning work with their hands. Here, an older artisan takes extra time showing her niece the art of backstrap weaving, holding tightly to the strings of tradition she received from her mother. I’m asked from time to time how we find time to work with Hill Tribers while we raise our kids. I find myself looking back over these 6 years and wondering how I would’ve done it without them. This community of hard-working mothers teaches me how to be a better one, and I’m forever grateful to be a part of an organization that celebrates who they are and how far they’ve come.

As you take time out to honor your mother this year, let your Mother’s Day present honor another mother working hard to establish a new life for her family here in Austin. If you order products in our Etsy shop by May 5, you can use code MOMSDAY13 to save 15%. Plus, we’ll ship in time for Mother’s Day, May 12. 

I hadn’t planned on going out at all. It was the Friday after Thanksgiving, late afternoon. We had been having a lazy, movie-watching, game-playing kind of day. I had a few things to drop off at some Hill Tribers’ houses, but it wouldn’t have mattered if I waited till Monday.

I almost stayed home.

But the girls were getting bored and whining loudly outside the room where my husband was working from home. So we left him upstairs, bundled into the car and took off.

We hung out with Hela and her kids for a few minutes. The girls watched cartoons and ran around the living room while I caught up on their holiday. (They had a Burmese barbecue for Thanksgiving day–yum.) We chatted about a friend we’re both worried about. I asked about her mom in the refugee camp in Thailand. Their Christmas tree was twinkling in the corner.

On a whim I decided to add one more apartment because my girls wanted to see their little friends.

We walked across the apartment complex full of shrieking children. We skirted the soccer game in the cul-de-sac. We waved at friends. I tickled Boe’s side while she rode by on new her bike with training wheels. We climbed three stories to the top apartment where one of our artisans lives.

My littlest climbs the stairs with all the confidence in the world. She knows exactly where we’re going.

When we got there, the teenage girls told me to sit down and wait–their mom was coming back. I told them I could go, but they kept insisting I sit down. My girls were already full-on into the game of hide-and-seek they play there. This artisan has six children and the last two are the exact ages of my girls.

The artisan came home a few minutes later. She is not always the easiest for me to read–there’s not the instant connection between us I feel with some of the other women. But I could read her face clear as a bell that day.

She was devastated.

The story came tumbling out through her oldest daughter. She ran to the store for a minute. She left her wallet in the grocery shopping cart. She forgot it, got halfway home before she realized and raced back. By then, of course, it was gone.

In it were her food stamp card (it works like a debit card), her Texas ID, and cash she had just gotten that day.

Without the food stamp card, there would be no food.

I sat right down and pulled out my cell phone. The competence of her teenage daughters is astounding–one grabbed a pen and notebook, the other sat by her mom to translate. As I talked first to the food stamp office and then to the police department, I would ask the girls questions and they would write down the answers quickly: address, food stamp account number, social security number, details about the wallet. We reported the theft and cancelled the food stamp card.

When I repeated to them what the food stamp office said, that it would take seven business days to get a new card, the girls widened their eyes.

Seven business days means more than a week in which their family can’t go to the grocery store.

Here’s an important fact about this family: they are extremely hard-working. The dad has worked himself into extra hours and better pay in the kitchen at a local institution. The oldest boy works; the girls plan on college soon. This is not a family I could take to a soup kitchen. They don’t do handouts. They work hard for what they have.

Which is why the $80 in cash the mom had just earned was such a loss–she was making and selling things to friends and that money was as much as she could earn in a week, easily.

This is where the grand coincidence comes in–had I not been in the room that day, had I not gone on a whim to play with refugee babies, I might not have known about this situation. But we had just finished processing checks from Artreach and this particular artisan made more money than almost anyone else at the event.

It was in my power to give her money that she had earned that would tide them over nicely.

Hundreds of dollars. One of the single biggest pay checks we had ever written to one woman in the history of Hill Tribers.

(I told you she was a hard worker.)

Two days later, I was back. It was a late Sunday afternoon and I took my littlest with me. We brought the artisan a check and some more work.

It’s sometimes hard to read my friend, at least for me. She smiles politely in a way that doesn’t meet her eyes most of the time. Otherwise her expressions are fairly stoic. I’m used to it–warm personalities are rare in the artisan group we work with. And I have seen her laugh until the tears come with her friends.

And every once in a while she pats my shoulder or squeezes my arm.

When I handed the check to her, I expected the usual–a polite nod and careful folding to put it back in the envelope. Instead she looked at it, looked at me, then looked at it again. Quietly, her eyes filled with tears.

Just for a minute.

Then she started ordering the big girls around. They ran to the fridge and got out orange sodas.

We celebrated the occasion with hugs and orange sodas all around.

These are the coincidences I cannot explain away. Sometimes I show up in an apartment in the middle of a story playing out I could never anticipate. I have felt the goose-bump thrill of knowing that in that exact moment, events were happening that I could not explain.

Could this family have made it without my bringing them that check? Probably. I was going to deliver checks today anyway. But the stress and lack of dignity that would have come from scrambling for food or going to a food pantry was avoided because I came.

I’m an academic, an intellectual, a skeptic by nature. But I’ve been converted again and again and again by tiny, unexplainable coincidences. I have become addicted to them. In a random apartment on the third floor of a complex most middle-class people would drive by on their way somewhere, in the midst of a community that is half-forgotten and rarely understood, the real story is playing out.

The center of the action is in the margins of my life.

And it’s so gorgeous, the narrative being woven in the out-of-the-way corners of Austin, that I sometimes fall to my knees at the holiness of it all.

They come from across the city and they’re ever-moving. To gather all of our artisans in one place is not an easy task. We made phone calls, asked all the translators we could find to come, figured out bus routes and van routes and carpools, for this: Our first ever Hill Tribers All-Hands Meeting.

 (My favorite thing about this picture is that from left to right, it’s same-same-same-JESSICA’S HEAD-same-same-CAREN’S HEAD-same. Taken by the fabulous Kelsi Williamson.)

There was a party feel that night in our church’s foyer, the only space big enough for these women and two men (Dr. Salai, our translator, and Htoo, a grandfather who watches his five grandchildren and sews bibs and Christmas ornaments for us–he’s in the back on the left, 8-10 in). Several of the artisans do not speak the same language. They come from hill tribes scattered throughout Burma and in their mountain villages, hundreds of dialects are spoken. Our more educated artisans, the ones who came down from the mountains for school or lived near larger villages, speak Burmese. Several of them do not, so they only know Karen or Karenni or Chin or Kachin or the many different dialects within those people groups. And yet, when I look at this picture, they are all mixed together, Karen next to Karenni, Kachin beside Burmese. There are few distinctions among them. They are a tiny diaspora in the middle of Texas, these hard-working hand-crafters, the keepers of their culture, the anchors of their homes.

I love them so much it makes me ache. Seeing so many people I love in the same room does me good. We filled out questionaires slowly, slowly–many of them don’t know their addresses, their social security numbers, or how to spell their children’s names. Several of them are illiterate, so the ones who can read and write filled out questions for the rest.

We showed them our plans for the fall, the prototypes we’ve been working on that we’ll be asking them to make over the summer. Some of the women have been designing new products and they have already begun teaching their friends how to make them. They are gorgeous and I can’t wait to show you. We’ll have sneak peeks up on our Facebook page every Friday until our new product launch August 28–like us to get the inside scoop. Here’s the sneak peek from last week:

I need to be really clear about something: when I talk about products on this blog, it’s not because I love to sell things or want to make you buy stuff. None of the money from the product sales currently goes to Caren or me; we’ve recently been awarded a grant that pays for the small, small amount of money that we make for 10 hours a week of work (10 hours a week-HA!). At some point if our business grows enough, we might include operation costs into the price of the products, but we haven’t gotten there yet. All of the money goes for two things: 30% for supplies and overhead, 70% to the woman or man who makes it. We keep just enough to keep going so that these brave artisans can actually earn some money for their families since the vast majority of them cannot work because of children at home or health problems or illiteracy or many other issues. This is it, the one thing they can do, and we are helping them carve out new lives with their traditional skills.

Here’s why I will spread the word, push to sell these products, knock on doors, peddle things out of the back of my car, do whatever it takes to get the word out: I love these artisans. I admire them completely. Their courage in the face of adversity is a never-ending source of encouragement to me. They have survived war and persecution and darkness beyond anything I can imagine and they smile with such joy, it breaks me every time.

Those faces, those people I love, are the reason for all of it. I will do whatever it takes to spread the word that these women and men are worth supporting. Their work is beautiful, their lives even more so. Being in that room that night confirmed it for me for the thousandth time–I’m so grateful to be in a place where I can watch the story of this group unfolding it all of its beautfy and complexity. And I love getting to tell that story to you.

Find out more on our website, Facebook page, Twitter account or follow our new product development on Pinterest.

And oh my word, the gorgeous things they’re creating–it’s amazing to watch true artists at work. August 28 is going to be good.

The last time I talked to Bob the Creeper was in a parking lot surrounded by small boys he was loading up in his pick-up truck to take to the “store.” It is the clearest instance in my life of literally standing up to evil. Bob had been a friend and a trusted ally in our fight to help our refugee friends carve out a space, which made the fact that I stood before him shouting and shaking with rage even more painful.

It took us a long time to realize Bob was a raging pedophile.

When we first met him, he was introduced by some other volunteers at a different church as the man who knew all of the refugees. There was no reason to think anything of his actions; we loved the fact that this ministry brought us in contact with people who were so different from us. A single truck driver in his 50s and a bunch of young people in their late 20s banded together, called each other often, and combined their efforts to change their neighbors’ lives. Bob was the heart of what we did.

He knew each of the children by name. He made sure their families had groceries and paid their bills. He had a map in his head of the apartments they lived in. They all had his number and called him frequently to come over and help.

He even babysat the young children of single mothers. That’s how giving he was.

Bob was a photographer who took really lovely pictures. Most refugees I know hang snapshots on the wall with a piece of tape, no frame. Their living rooms walls are like dorm bulletin boards. You can see their history in the change from grainy snapshots of their family members or themselves shot by someone in the refugee camps to the later, better quality pictures they take in the States: school portraits, pictures of them posed rather shyly by a wall, pictures from cell phone cameras. To this day, some of the best pictures I see among my refugee friends were taken by Bob the Creeper.

Most of them are of the children, especially the young boys.

The picture of Bob above is the only one I have of him in which he’s not standing next to young boys, in fact. Obviously I don’t want to publish their faces on the internet (his name isn’t really “Bob”). He’s standing next to one of the single mothers whose son he “helped” frequently, praying. He is wearing the traditional Karen shirt given him gratefully by one of his Hill Triber friends. His camera is slung over his shoulder, ever ready.

Jonathan, my husband, gets the credit for first suspecting the truth. At a baby shower for a friend that we helped organize, Jonathan noticed that Bob spent most of the evening with his arm draped around the shoulders of one of the more effeminate fifteen-year-old boys. It was casual–I often put my arm around the children I love too–but there was a possessiveness to it that sent off warning bells. We asked some members at our church what to do; they sent us to the Family Watchdog website while they looked into it from their end.

On the Watchdog website, I found a picture of Bob with several convictions for indecency with young boys. I’ll never forget my shock at seeing his familiar face in a mug shot. We had suspected it, but the depth of the truth hurt. He had been on parole for several years. After calling the police and talking to CPS, everyone expressed horror, but no one could do a thing. Legally Bob’s parole did not include the clause that he avoid groups of children. It was up to us to set up a hedge of protection around families that loved and trusted Bob completely.

When we asked him about it, with his pastor beside us (the story of his church’s response is another layer I don’t want to get into), he became angry and resentful for awhile, then cried at his inability to stop himself, but he never denied it.

He never denied that he was sexually attracted to the young boys he was helping. He swore nothing had happened, but the fact that he wanted to, that he himself thought he was dangerous for them, was the most frightening thing. Of course things happened. We’re not idiots. We’re not blind.

The next several months became a nightmare of chasing a man we had once trusted in a community who had no idea what we were talking about. We held a community meeting with their refugee agency. They had three different translators repeating the words in the three languages represented. From the English-speaking agency director through the Burmese, Karen and Karenni translators, the message went to the group: This man is evil. He will hurt you. He will hurt your children. From the group back through the translators, the message was clear: We don’t understand. He buys us groceries. He plays with our children. He helps us with our bills. He is the person who knows us best.

We found out he was the contact listed for all of the elementary school children.

It’s hard to describe from a Western mindset the refugees’ reaction, but most of them are from a place where the people in charge have tried to kill them. They have an inherent distrust of authorities, of banks, of police, and of larger institutions. Sometimes this includes the refugee agency trying to help them. The people who are trustworthy are the ones who are deeply involved in their lives, like Bob the Creeper was. Far from banning him from their homes, they still called him frequently for rides and for babysitting.

We made posters with his picture. We talked with the community leaders. We made impassioned pleas with tears in our eyes.

We still ran into him, awkwardly, in the apartment complexes. He was asked by his pastor to stop immediately; several confrontations ensued between them. He was eventually disfellowshipped by a church he’d loved deeply because they had run out of options. He no longer represented them in the community.

But it didn’t stop him. He was determined. He was sneaky. His actions proved the depth of his addiction to this group. Trusting young boys who can barely speak the language, basically unmonitored for hours after school, who wouldn’t have a clue how to get out of the situation–the draw was entirely too powerful.

He was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He worked hard to gain the trust of the tenderest lambs.

There is not a chance in the world he was NOT molesting those children. But we couldn’t prove it and we couldn’t stop it. Believe me, we tried.

And then we finally saw him that day, loading up the boys in his pick-up truck.

To be continued…

It’s just not fair. Sometimes I get so mad.

There are so many times I’ve seen injustice up close since I began working with refugees. There are things that happen to the working poor that those of us who are middle-class never face. Their landlords treat them in ways my landlords have never treated me.

Our church and two other churches have been renting an apartment for three years now that we’ve used as a community outreach center to the many refugees living in this particular apartment complex. We’ve had homework help and Hill Triber meetings and potlucks and parties. It’s been a great space, even if it’s a tiny 1-bedroom apartment.

We’ve had silly, sad, scared, sweet, sacred moments together in those rooms.

We’re moving out, closing up shop, in June. We’re glad because it’s time to move on–many of our refugee friends are living in different apartments in Austin or have moved to other cities. We’re sorry to see this time come to an end.

But one thing I remain is angry.

In the time we’ve been renting this space, we’ve had the tiniest taste of what it is like to work with property managers and landlords in low-cost apartments. We’ve also helped our friends in apartments across the city–though management styles vary widely, many of the stories remain the same.

We’ve been lied too, blatantly, against all facts and reason.

We’ve seen slow responses that were devastating on important issues, like bed bugs and drug-dealing neighbors and water that was leaking down the living room wall like a grotesque waterfall.

We’ve had the same window kicked out or broken into six times in one year. Right now it’s covered in a trash bag and duct tape and has been for four weeks.

We’ve seen refugees huddled around a single heater in record-breaking freezes because the super couldn’t be bothered to fix their thermostat. For 9 days.

We’ve seen children playing outside in parking lots filled with broken glass.

We’ve seen corridors that were pitch black at dusk because the drug dealers didn’t want anyone to see who was coming and going or because the landlords couldn’t be bothered to put new lightbulbs in the external lights. Any of them. In the whole building.

Right now, several of our friends are in a building where the gas was turned off and hasn’t been turned back on again in over a week. They’re taking cold showers. I have no idea how they’re cooking food. None of them ever eat out.

The landlord who owned their apartment complex sold just one of the buildings to a new company who has barely been in touch. No one knew where to pay their rent or how to get things fixed. When they asked at the apartment office (the one they’d been paying rent to since they moved in), they were told to “google it.” We’ve been trying–we finally found someone, the same person who turned the gas off last week.

Theoretically they’re going to come tomorrow to turn it on. And maybe they’ll fix the lights and the windows. But it’s been week after week of unsafe, inhumane living conditions and frankly, I’m tired of it.

We’re googling, all right, property rights and the owner’s name. We’re on this, my friends. Sometimes we look at the injustices that are brought about only because of poverty and we feel so overwhelmed we can’t do anything. But we sure can figure out why the heck there’s no gas.

This is our new motto:

*My friend Constance tweeted me this image last night and I love it.

I might not be able to up and move to Kenya to work for International Justice Mission like some awesome people I know. But I can at least assist said awesome person as she looks into the background of this situation. Kelsi’s been on the ground, kicking bootie and taking names this week. Constance has been the go-to girl for the whole situation. And if you remember Kelsi’s and Constance’s posts about poverty, you know they practice what they preach.

I’m not sure how much help I’m going to be, but I’m mad enough to start making calls. Better watch out.

We’re going to stick it to these slumlords, y’all.

(Or just call them nicely to ask them what the deal is.)

***Updated to add: It was an amazing day. I did confront the new property manager and what happened next floored me. We’re going to be watching it over the weekend. Come back on Monday for the rest of the story.***

Published originally on the Hill Tribers blog.

We were planning on writing a bit more about our product development, but we wanted to interrupt with late breaking news about one of our Hill Triber family. Sae is a 19-year-old refugee who just had her first baby here in Austin yesterday. Her young husband called their English on Wheels partner Tandy when they found out the doctor wanted to induce. Despite the fact that their family had just returned that day from a trip, the amazing Tandy went straight to pick up Sae and Soe and take them to the hospital.

Sae’s mom, who is also part of Hill Tribers, was at home with her other children, so Tandy took her place as a surrogate mom. Tandy called us several times to fill us in–when the Pitocin started, getting connected to the language line, what the doctor said, how the husband looked. When I asked her if she needed anything, she said, “I’ve got my granola bar, water and a camera! I’m ready!” Early the next morning, Sae and Soe became the proud parents of a handsome baby boy.

It wasn’t that long ago that Caren and I were visiting one of our first friends in the hospital at the birth of her baby boy. We remember the look of bewilderment on her face; though doctors got the language line up and running (each hospital has access to a line where a translator is waiting to help translate for the patients), it’s still a nerve-wracking experience. I was nervous in the births of each of my girls, even though my family was all around, in my home country, with a doctor I knew and trusted, and with my husband by my side. I cannot imagine how much worse it would be to have your first baby in a new strange place.

We also had a Burmese friend here who went into labor without being able to call anyone. She gave birth to a baby alone in her bathroom in her apartment in North Austin. An ambulance came later, with all of the ensuing chaos and lights and noise. I still regret that she had to go through that and wished we had known her better at the time to go with her.

Over the years, we’ve spent a lot of time in local hospitals. It was a relief and a joy to have a friend like Tandy that was there by Sae’s side the whole time. As Tandy said in her facebook update, she’s so blessed that her family was in the right place at the right time. We’re so blessed that her family is so ready to participate deeply in the lives of these friends that we love. Tandy and her family are a gift. They’re part of why we love our communities here in Austin and are so excited to see them merge together into an unlikely fellowship.

We had one other baby born that night, a baby girl to one of Sae and Soe’s neighbors from Burundi. We’re so excited to welcome these bundles of love to our little village and can’t wait to see them grow up together! Congratulations to both of our new moms and special thanks to our fantastic volunteers!

I’m double blogging this week. Every post on this blog is going to also be featured on the Hill Country Hill Tribers blog, except for the fantastic post on Christianity and Poverty coming your way on Thursday from my friends Mark and Ali.

Hill Country Hill Tribers is so pleased to announce that we are the recipients of a grant from the Moriah Foundation. It is the first grant we’ve received and we’re thrilled that it’s from a foundation made up of people who have meant so much to my family over the years. After 4+ years of doing this side project on a voluntary basis, Caren and Jessica are finally going to be funded to work at Hill Tribers part-time. And, even more importantly, we will be hiring refugee women on a regular basis to work as teachers, designers, translators and artisan liaisons. If you thought we did amazing things in the past, just wait till you see what we can do now!

Hill Country Hill Tribers started as an ESL class with a handful of weavers and their children. Over the years we’ve adapted and changed with our community. We are so deeply in love with the women we work with–we have been blessed by them so much. One of the things we love the most is that we’re raising our children together. We are a group of women (and a couple of men, both grandfathers!) who spend most of our time with small children. We’ve seen first hand the way our artisans have turned their lives inside out for their kids. Every single one of them came over to the United States from the refugee camps in Thailand, Malaysia and India in order to provide their children with a better life. This grant will enable us to work hard to help them earn supplemental income while staying home with their children. It will also help us teach them marketable skills to find jobs in the future and integrate more fully into their new home.

We are mothers helping mothers. It only seemed fitting, then, to announce our new grant just in time for Mother’s Day. And because we’re so excited about this blessing in our little group, we wanted to pass the joy on to you.

From now until Tuesday, May 7, if you buy a product on our website, you can receive 10% off by entering the code MOMSUNITE. Because giving something to a mother you love that gives back to another mom is a pretty great deal.

And if you like what you see on our website, stayed tuned. This whole week, we’ll be blogging about where we are and where we’re going. We have lots of plans that this grant enables us to do. We also have fantastic new products we’re developing. We can’t wait to share our plans with you. And we can’t wait to share the love–be watching our Facebook and Twitter pages for easy giveaways for the next three Fridays!