Green Cotton

Photosource: www.invisiblechildren.com

“Starting a fashion mutiny by giving high style a soul.™”
Invisible Children (IC) was the organization that made a name for itself with the horrific video documentary that exposed Joseph Kony’s scheme to kidnap children and force them to fight in his rebel army in the Eastern Congo beginning in 2003.

Today Invisible Children is a broader franchise, and while their mission has remained exactly the same, their means of achieving the same end are now multifaceted. IC representatives spend time traveling to raise awareness about this issue, continue to create documentaries, and have started sewing cooperatives to help former female child soldiers emancipate themselves economically.

One of their main sewing cooperatives is called “MEND”. The goal of “MEND” is to “Seam a personal connection between products and their makers, while repairing the lives of women in distressed regions of the world.”

Photosource: www.invisiblechildren.com

Each garment is signed by the women artisan who crafted it, so that purchasers can go to the website and read her personal story documented in video bios, photos, and testimonies. All of these different means of documentation are meant to explain how each individual woman is “on the MEND” economically and emotionally due to both her participation in the MEND program as well as the purchases made.
Female child soldiers in Joseph Konys rebel’s army are often also used as sex slaves. When they finally escape to return to Ugandan society, they are ostracized because of their affiliation with the rebels. They are given sewing lessons as “brief rehabilitation” but skills learned through this program are generally not in high demand.

Additionally by offering women lessons about health, literacy, numeracy, savings and investment, MEND gives women life skills necessary to be self-sufficient. In addition, MEND teaches women tailoring skills that are above average, giving them versatility to make men’s, women’s and unisex products.

IC has a Savings and Investment Training Institute (SITI) which gives MEND seamstresses the skills they need to run their own small business and open a savings account, through which they can then receive medical care and pay for school related fees for their children.

Lastly, MEND helps women ‘mend’ emotionally from the inside by pairing each seamstress with an IC mentor, with whom they meet monthly and work through unresolved psychological traumas and provide basic HIV and AIDS awareness training.

By offering all these methods of recovery, MEND program is extremely comprehensive, thinking of all needs these women may have economically but also emotionally, and tries to provide means for them to “MEND” completely.
For this reason, the MEND program is quite amazing, and worth anyone’s support. While their products are not available on the Invisible Children website just yet, they are expected to be up by late 2009. To see others way to support Invisible Children like these women seamstresses, go to the Invisible Children website.

By Julia Rea