Local boutique offers Third-World artisans a 'fair trade'

Melody Hull COURTESY PHOTO When Melody Hull's husband Victor visited Kenya in 2006, he brought back beads made by poor Kenyan women. She had just opened He, She & Me, a coffee shop, boutique store and florist in a small strip mall on U.S. 41 across from Lee Memorial Hospital.

They made about $1,000 selling the beads at her shop and gave it back to the poor women in Kenya. Soon Ms. Hull, 50, wanted more: the beautiful handmade goods and the help they bought the people who made them.

Tall, expressive and brewing some fresh coffee, she was careful to explain how a relatively small sum of money can be an enormous help in getting medical care for these African women.

After Ms. Hull developed a taste for the handmade goods from Third-World countries, she started searching for more sources to those artisans.

After some research, Ms. Hull discovered Ten Thousand Villages, a nonprofit organization that markets handcrafted goods from those artisans to North American customers. They operate on fair trade principles. The guidelines include giving a fair wage to people who craft the products, even if they are so poor they accept just about any payment.

"It's kind of the antithesis of China," Ms. Hull said, where workers are often paid wages below the poverty level. "It means the fat cats aren't getting fatter and fatter and fatter. What it boils down to is, if you're at the top of the pyramid, taking a little less, so the guy holding you up can take a little more."

About three-quarters of her items come from Ten Thousand Villages. But the rest comes from upstairs. About 260 missionaries cross paths in the rooms above her store in the strip mall. New Mission Systems International is located up there.

The missionaries come and go.

Ms. Hull had originally picked this location for her store because she knew some people at the mission, upstairs from First Christian Church.

"There was one guy up there recently, Ukrainian shirt, backpack, always needing coffee," Ms. Hull said. "And the guy that went to Mexico, very short haircut. And a guy with dreadlocks — he's in Kentucky looking to do some urban ministries."

Some of the missionaries e-mail or call Ms. Hull while they're overseas. They have brought her pottery from Bulgaria, finger puppets from Malaysia, nativity scenes from an orphanage in Rwanda. Remarkably, the Rwandan women who make the nativity scenes sell them to raise money to help men who had killed their husbands in genocide and are now in jail. She also sells wooden vases from Peru, which goes to help children there who are sexually abused.

On one painting from Uganda— it appears two women are making some kind of stew — the artist wrote an overseas phone number next to a signature on the bottom corner of the canvas.

Another item is a photo album from Costa Rica, made of banana leaves, seed pods, handmade paper and wood. "When you look at it, you can see how rough hewn it is," she said.

Ms. Hull never knows exactly when a new item will come in. "I have to wait for people to go on these trips," she said. "It's like you wait with bated breath."

Recently, a missionary brought her two trunks of Bulgarian pottery. "It goes rather rapidly," Ms. Hull said. "It's unique and you can cook in it too. It's functional, not just pretty."

Although Ms. Hull is surrounded by goods from around the world, the last place she traveled, six years ago, was Russia. One day last week, she was planning to meet with a bride for whom she was arranging flowers and talk with a missionary from Bolivia on the phone — he's bringing her handbags and finger puppets. She was also thinking of her mother who has Lou Gehrig's disease, and would be moving in with her the next day. She lives in Fort Myers with her husband Victor, an editor at

the Sarasota Herald Tribune.

Ms. Hull said when she started selling the fair-trade items an accountant told her giving nearly 50 percent of the profit back wasn't a lucrative way to do business. Her response was, "If I have $1 today and somebody else does too, is that not lucrative?"

Besides, she gets a thrill out of knowing how far an item has traveled.

"I would get a gourd from Kenya and be like 'oh my God, it has dust on it,'" she said. "And it was like getting a piece of someone from over there."