Update of new management

Well, Emmy has been official owner /manager of Belekria for 4 months now, and she has been great!  She is flat out purchasing supplies, orgainsing paperwork and orders, and record keeping, not to mention bouncing ideas with me.  Im very happy to be avoiding the sewing room without guilt!

A week or two ago Emmy orgainsed a bimonthly meeting to be here at our home, so all the staff arrived after lunch and Emmy chaired the meeting.  A number of topics were discussed, including current orders status, rent, expansion, and time was given for any problems or issues (there weren't any so that was a relief :)
The women spoke about the landlord offering more floorspace, as the current room is VERY crowded, (especially with almost 2000 pads waiting to be picked up by Red Cross).  They also would like to be able to have a dedicated shop front space to display clothes, and to begin to offer secondhand clothing for sale as well.
I also mentioned that a relative of Emmys is wanting a machine to extend her sewing business on the island of Atauro. I suggested that perhaps we could almost franchise Belekria, and set her up to make pads on the island.

I also wondered about renting the whole building rather than just an extra room.
It was wonderful to feel like I was a part of the discussions but not in any responsibility.  Just the way I like it.

Emmy has grasped record keeping well, only making the odd mistake :)  She handled a end of month /payroll without me (while we were in Australia), and is getting adept at purchasing materials.  Thank God for Emmy.

Ill keep you posted on the franchise idea.... I reckon its a winner.

Time Management

While these massive order of pads has been quite an intense focus for Belekria, it hasn’t really stopped them from completing other smaller jobs.  The women have been good at delegating roles, so one of them is responsible for mending jobs that come in.  She will serve the customer and do the mending then get back into the pad factory line.

Another woman is in charge of keeping up with the lumber rolls.  I'm not actually sure if I’ve mentioned these before, but a lovely lady from NZ has a physiotherapy practice here in Dili and she sells lumber rolls.  She has been getting Belekria to sew them since Jan and tends to buy 5-10 a month.  They have even been taking extra work home with them in order to stay on top of things, so I have been impressed by their dedication.

They are always making school uniform sales and adjustments, as well as whipping up a few extra items to try and sell at markets.

CARE order confirmed

This is old news now!  Apparently i didnt actually post this earlier.....
 CARE has since picked up their order and we have been able to maintain one of the three women as an extra part time staff member since then.

We have received a few visits by CARE staff over the past few weeks, and they have officially ordered 500 pads *YAY* 

 This confirmed us keeping the extra 3 women working for a second month.  

CARE also have provided a lot of encouragement and support to the Belekria staff, and have given a few good suggestions.

One of which is to try and inform the Ministry of Health about the issue of MHM (Menstrual Hygiene Management)  and what Belekria is doing.  So Emmy has made a number of visits to the Ministry of Health and has been receiving good feedback and last week she was asked to write a letter to someone important within the Dept.  She tried to deliver it twice today but the important person was out both times, so she will try again tomorrow.

A second good prompt from CARE was that Belekria needs a bank account.    We had been making feeble attempts to get that sorted but when we realised that both these large orders will want an account to pay into, we found some extra motivation.

I'm not sure what its like to open a business bank account tin Oz, but here the list of documents was pretty long – 9 I think. Thankfully most of them we had already form the registration process.  But one more was needed.  So far this has meant 3 trips to various Gov. locations, hopefully now it won’t be long before we have a bank account.  CARE has since become a little worried that the account won’t be open before the end of the month, so as a precaution they have asked Emmy to write a letter to request payment as a personal check, so this will be a good backup.  CARE need to pay us before the end of June, so the women have been working hard on completing their order quickly.

When the women started cutting out the bulk pads PUL, we found them a few times starting from one side of the fabric straight, but by mid way across the tessellations were not joining up.  First I just tried to cut out 3 extra single templates so they could set out a few at a time, but this still did not seem to be adequate.  So my thinking cap went on, and I decided to cut a large template which could reach across the folded PUL.  Many hours of careful cutting later I had produced a foldable template, that seems to be effective.