The above image is from bedouinweaving.com.

Just finished the first draft of a story on a Charlottesville, Virginia, woman who is helping Negev Bedouin Women market their traditional, hand-woven rugs in this country–and not as a money-making endeavor for herself.

Political realities forced the Bedouin to end their traditional nomadic life in the middle of the last century. The Negev Bedouin’s settled in villages and towns as the poorest of the poor. The men took factory jobs, but the women–once integral to herding, harvesting, weaving, and home-keeping were left without anything useful to do or any way to make money.

Prue Thorner, the woman I did the story on, was visiting family in Israel when she discovered that the Bedouin women of the tiny village of Lakiya had begun weaving traditional rugs as a cottage industry–marketing them throughout Israel through the unlikely medium of high-speed Internet. And they were looking for a way to reach overseas markets.

Ms. Thorner went to work to create a non-profit that would sell these rugs directly to Americans. She takes enough of the sales price to cover expenses, the rest of the money goes directly to the Bedouin women.

Here’s a quote directly from Prue Thorner:

Someone suggested that I should triple the price of the carpets, put an ad in the New Yorker and they would sell thousands of them every year. And I said, “you know something? This isn’t what this enterprise is about. This is about helping women one at a time to carry on in their traditional ways and not destroying their culture. so it’s a fundamentally different paradigm.”

I’m so glad to hear of an American offering help to another culture that doesn’t bring with it any pressure to Americanize. Sounds very sober, doesn’t it? As in live and let live . . .