Monday, October 02, 2006 From litter to home decors By Russtum G. Pelima
KIAMBA, Sarangani -- There's a place where mothers turn litter into decors. Santa Cruz is a small coastal village in Kiamba town where hundreds of fishers live in wooden shelters. They fish with hook and line for their livelihood and food.
Surprisingly, unique, colorful wall decors and ornaments adorn scores of houses; some hanging by the doors like curtains which you can't find in the market.
"These are plastic wrappers of the chichiria bought by children in sari-sari stores you see around here," Rose Canoy explains.
She displayed with some pride the colorful decorations inside their house.
Rose, 30, enjoys her leisure time collecting and cutting these empty wrappers into small pieces.
Then, she would patiently pleat them into shapes like very small cylinders, and place them in arrays of green, red, blue, yellow, or silver colors after having made 300 or 500 of them.
"I do this while my husband sails for some catch," Rose says. "O dili gani kanang matulog o magdula kaning duha nako ka gagmay (Or when my two small children are asleep or playing)."
Some curious visitors had already bought souvenirs here.
"They wanted to buy them so we have to make some more. We know they like it so we give it to them at P50 or P70 per set," Rose says.
Moving around, we saw colorful decors hanging by the doors or ceilings of other houses. Their different designs and sizes caught our attention with their bright, attractive look.
They have sharply contrasted the shanties' dull colors.
Bebing Banais, Rose's neighbor, has her own collection of these unique decors too.
Forty-year-old Bebing says she can make the visitor any design, after having mastered the art for three years now.
Rose and Bebing use candle glue to paste litters around empty bottles.
When there's no money to buy glue, they sew them on a round-shaped carton.
Rose makes her idea of a chandelier very meticulously that those small cylindrical plastic wrappers reveal a color pattern.
"Sometimes I would sew some thirty pieces of them using a needle and a thread in different lengths and hang them under the round-shaped carton or empty bottle," Rose adds.
Meantime, life goes on for their fisher-husbands.
Along the shore, some men are loading bags of fist-size stones into their outriggers. They use the stones as sinkers for their baits.
One of them, Rose's husband, sailed out to the seas that night hoping for a bountiful catch to feed the family.
At the same time, some small boats are also arriving with men unloading their catch for the day.
Some of them perhaps will someday no longer sail the perilous seas during the night if these handicrafts from litters become a lucrative cottage industry. (Sarangani Information Office)
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