Stitches that heal

GLEN ELLYN, Ill.—A scent of warm glue drifts in the air inside a cozy handbag workshop in suburban Chicago. Sewing machines whir, scissors snip, and women banter as they assemble trendy clutches, totes, and wallets that will sell in grocery stores and airports.

Gyulnara Karayeva, wearing a multicolored apron, sews shut the final seam of a fresh cloth wallet, then uses a pink hammer to soften the stiff corners. Bop, bop, bop! She warms the wallet with a hot iron and announces, “Finished!” The $29 wallet will be labeled with her name: “Handmade by Gyulnara from Georgia.”

That’s Georgia the country, not the state. Karayeva moved from Georgia to Uzbekistan to Russia before resettling in the United States in 2005. She and the other workers—known here as artisans—are refugees driven from their homelands by war or political oppression. The nonprofit Renew Project runs the workshop in this middle-class town in northeastern Illinois to provide paying jobs for refugee women navigating life in a new land, sometimes with few friends or family. Besides hourly wages, the workshop offers a sense of community that can foster friendship and help heal emotional scars.

“The business is just a tool to provide a space to build community,” said Susan Tripi DeLano, the executive director. “We want to be a space that blesses them.”

Women like Karayeva find joy simply in creating beautiful products. When I visited on two recent summer afternoons, Karayeva bustled me into the workshop’s adjacent showroom, hung with dozens of bags and accessories for sale, including items the redheaded Georgian had made: A zippered journal cover decorated with parrots. A pink purse. A reversible tote with red, green, and blue stripes. “You want it another color, you use this side,” she said, opening the bag and beaming with pride.

Renew runs a weekly sewing class and has trained or employed more than 120 refugee women in the past three years. The group is not overtly Christian because it seeks to provide an inclusive workspace for refugees of diverse religious backgrounds, including Muslims, Christians, and Hindus. But DeLano said staff and volunteers pray for the artisans and try to show Christ-like love to women who’ve experienced much suffering.

Fatma Buho, a Somali refugee with a pink headscarf covering her red hair, has worked at Renew since it began in 2009. She showed me her current sewing project—a prototype travel bag United Airlines will sell in its stores. It had waterproof fabric, zippers with pockets, and tweaks Buho added herself, like an extra-wide mouth and extra-long handles. “I always liked sewing and design when I was young,” she said.

Buho moved to Yemen in 1992 as a civil war ravaged her homeland. She spent years in a refugee camp before resettling in the United States in 2004 with her five young children. “My little one was 1 when we came here. Now he’s going to be 13.”

To make ends meet, Buho, 42, works up to 60 hours a week—four days at Renew and three days at an electrical assembly plant. She appreciates the job at Renew because it allows her the flexibility to take her children to weekday appointments. “Workaholic,” she chuckled with a weary smile, sitting at her sewing machine. “Every day working.”

Some women arrive at Renew overwhelmed, lonely, and avoiding eye contact. “Until you talk to them and get them to talk to you, they are just in their corner,” said the workshop manager, Nancy Mwendwa, herself a Kenyan immigrant. She jokes with newcomers to help lower their defenses.

The laughter seems to work. Like old friends, the artisans joked and chatted about spicy food, the Fourth of July, Ramadan (some, like Karayeva and Buho, were fasting), and the ages of one artisan’s two preschool children (almost exactly one year apart).

“If they have the same birthday, it’s better for you, because you have one birthday and one cake,” teased Nazi, an Iranian refugee. (She declined to give her full name because she still has family in Iran.)

“This is like a family. You poke each other in the face in a nice way,” said Mwendwa. “It’s part of the healing process.”

Between the jokes, Buho admitted, “Life’s not easy.” But the sewing job is helping her make day-by-day progress. After years of renting, she recently began the process of buying her first house. Her children—a long way from Yemen and Somalia—are stepping forward too: Three attend college, and one hopes to become an eye doctor.