Weaving a Hopeful Future

By Barbara Justus

On a chilly spring morning, Shi Guangzhi wakes around dawn to the papery sound of silkworms rustling through the fresh mulberry leaves she laid out the night before. The sound is comforting, an assurance that all is well with her precious livestock.

Guangzhi is a sericulturist, or silkworm farmer, in Sichuan Province, China. Her first priority of every day – before putting water on for tea or preparing her children's breakfast – is checking on her silkworms.

The silkworms noisily munch their way through layers of leaves in large wicker trays stacked in her kitchen. Guangzhi picks through them carefully and selects a few to inspect, rolling them gently between her forefinger and thumb. The silkworms' white velvety heads bob hungrily as she evaluates their progress on their journey toward remarkable metamorphoses.

These silkworms mean everything to Guangzhi. The beautiful iridescent fibers they spin have lifted her and hundreds of women like her out of poverty, with the help of Heifer International.

Since Guangzhi began working with Heifer just two years ago, she has quadrupled her family's annual income.

Continue supporting Heifer projects similar to this one in the Sichuan Province. Give to Heifer International.

Trained to Succeed, Privileged to Share
Heifer International empowers resource-poor people like Guangzhi to help themselves by providing food-producing or income-producing livestock such as cows, goats, pigs, poultry – even silkworms.

Before they receive their animals, Heifer project partners must complete extensive training in every aspect of their new enterprise, from feeding and breeding the animals to marketing the end product. They also receive training in environmental sustainability, gender equity and community development.

The first goal of Heifer project partners is to use their gifts of livestock to achieve self-sufficiency for their families.

However, ask Guangzhi or any other Heifer project partner about the most gratifying aspect of their partnership with Heifer, and they'll tell you it is their obligation – and privilege – to pass on a comparable gift to another family in need.

And this one small gift starts a chain reaction that results in widespread self-sufficiency and dignity within a community.

Weaving a Hopeful Future

Women's Group Weaves its Way to Equality
In Guangzhi's community in Lezhi County, the gift of silkworms from Heifer has woven a hopeful future for hundreds of women and their families.

These women are quite isolated, their small homes perched amid rugged and remote mountains in western China. Yet they are part of a growing community group started in 1997 and known as "Heifer International's Lezhi Women's Silkworm Project."

The fact that an organized group of highly trained entrepreneurs exists in this remote, impoverished pocket of the world is remarkable. However, what's most amazing is that its members are primarily female – women who not long ago were considered second-class citizens with no education, no means to contribute to their families' incomes and little decision-making rights within the family structure.

Now, most women in this silkworm project provide more than 60 percent of their families' income.

Their quality of life has increased immeasurably, not only because of this rise in income, but also because of the elevated status brought on by their hard-won self-sufficiency.

They now have an equal say in how the family income is spent – on nourishing food, including protein-rich duck eggs for their children; on school fees and books; and on medical care that was once out of reach.

Hard Work with a Soft Touch
The Lezhi women have worked hard to become skilled sericulturists.

The silkworms, so delicate and tiny upon hatching that they must be handled with a feather, increase their body weight 10,000 times under the women's meticulous care. The worms feed on leaves of the fast-growing mulberry trees that the women have planted in a way that also curbs soil erosion on their small plots of land.

When a farmer determines that a silkworm is ready to spin, she moves it to a pile of straw where it begins its miraculous spinning. The silk comes from two glands filled with a fluid called fibroin (like liquid silk) that the worm squeezes out, along with a thick paste called sericin that cements the two filaments together. The cemented double strand hardens and dries when it is exposed to air.

When the last drop of liquid silk is spent and the cocoon is complete, the women remove the cocoons from the straw. At that point, either they take the cocoons to a local silk cooperative to be processed or they do the processing themselves.

Each precious cocoon may yield more than a half-mile of life-giving silk.

Now when the women of Lezhi County come together, their conversations don't dwell on the severe hardships of the past, but on their dreams for the future.

With their extra income, several women in the group have had wells dug near their homes, saving untold hours previously spent hauling water. Others have installed energy-efficient stoves in their kitchens - using less fuel while saving themselves and their children from the noxious fumes of open fires.

With additional training from Heifer, many have leveraged their extra income to expand their agricultural operations.

Guangzhi, for example, is now also raising 17 goats, which live under her precious mulberry trees, eating rye grasses she planted and leftover mulberry leaves not needed by the hungry silkworms. She collects the dead silkworm pulpae, grinds them into meal and adds it to her goats' feed as an excellent protein supplement.

Nothing goes to waste in Guangzhi's integrated farming operation.

Weaving a Hopeful Future

Spinning Out of Poverty, Into Self-Reliance
Thousands of years have passed since the Chinese discovered the art of weaving the shimmering filament from homely cocoons into luxurious fabrics.

The fabrics became so legendary that the Silk Road, made famous by Marco Polo, was built so this treasure could be shared. As East and West began to share goods, then art and philosophy, the world was transformed.

And, thanks to your gifts to Heifer International, the miraculous spinning by these fragile silkworms, unchanged over centuries, continues to transform lives.

So the next time you wrap yourself in a luxurious silk scarf, think warmly of Guangzhi and the other women of the Heifer Lezhi Silkworm Project, who are building their own silk road that leads from abject poverty to healthy independence.

Barbara Justus is a freelance writer for Heifer International.