Sewing Free

Six months ago, the foreign screeches of ten sewing machines began humming in a rural Moroccan village in the Middle Atlas Mountains. Amongst a cedar forest and fruit orchards, the echoes of the machines sounded more like rusty old diesel engines, 26-year-old Peace Corps Volunteer Audrey Huetteman recalls. 

Forty women had enrolled in a six-month sewing training program with uncertain hopes of learning a new technical skill that could potentially lead to job opportunities. The women were nervous-excited, Audrey says. Daunted by the six months ahead. Not many of the women had previously completed any formal training. Seven of them are illiterate. Only four earned university degrees.

The sewing machines were intimidating, the women reflect. A type of alien, a tool foreign from their day-to-day lives. To start, the women sewed on paper instead of fabric, simply trying to make straight lines. “It was like they all had lead feet,” Audrey laughs. The women pounded their feet on the pedals, viciously igniting the machines’ engines and rumbling the tables beneath. Rather than gliding in a straight line, the needles ferociously ate the paper. The women usually jumped out of their seats with fear. They’d shake off their anxiety with a nervous laugh in order to mask defeat. “My hands aren’t fit for sewing machines,” one woman named Izi admits, voicing the women’s shared insecurities. When class was over, the women immediately left the center, relieved to return to their familiar home.

All the women are active homemakers. They prepare four meals a day from scratch, often spending over two hours just to prepare lunch. Not to mention washing clothes, squeegeeing the floors, tackling mountains of dishes, and juggling their childrens’ school schedules. “My daily schedule exhausts me,” one sewer named Fatiha confesses, “but I’m committed to benefit from sewing as much as I can.”

In addition to their full schedules, some women also have to balance others’ expectations to devote themselves to the training. They feared that taking 10 hours a week to learn to sew was selfish and would ultimately disappoint their kids, husbands, and other family members.

​One woman named Manar shared that she always dreamed of learning to sew. Some of her friends had mastered the skill when she was growing up, but she was prohibited by her mother (and later her husband) to enroll in classes. She recently moved to the Middle Atlas Mountain village and upon learning about the sewing opportunity, she experienced “the most intense happiness of her life,” she remembers, smiling from ear to ear as she retells the story. She secretly registered in the classes without telling her family. 

The oldest woman in the sewing training program named Rabha also experienced doubt from other community members outside her own family. Do you still have a mind to learn? they’d challenge her. 

The biggest mental battle happened to be the women’s own self-doubt. “How can we learn to operate a machine if we don’t even know how to hold pencils?” they questioned. “So what if I’m uneducated,” a woman named Fatima now explains, “I’ve taken the first steps in pursuing an educated life.”

A prominent community leader, 35-year-old Abdelhaq Charrou, originally introduced the idea of the sewing training center in 2016. Abdelhaq is the president of the village’s first successful youth association. “Women are the most active members in the lives of youth,” Abdelhaq stresses. Empowered women means empowered youth, which will ultimately lead to a more empowered community. 

Women are the community, Abdelhaq asserts, women are number one in our community.

Abdelhaq is Peace Corps Volunteer Audrey’s host brother. “The first day I arrived, Abdelhaq told me ‘ana wyak b7al b7al’” (you and I are the same),” Audrey remembers. At the beginning of her 27-month-long service, Abdelhaq and Audrey spent countless hours hanging out in his office where he manages a soccer field. “We weren’t really explicitly working,” Audrey admits. “We were building our relationship, building trust, respect, safety, and open communication between us.” Since then, Audrey and Abdelhaq have become an admirable team. ​

The two wrote a Peace Corps grant in order to equip the center with sewing machines and all essential supplies. After creating the space, they found a teacher, formed a schedule, and mobilized 40 women to dedicate 10 hours a week to intense sewing classes and 3 hours a week to educational sessions focused on soft skills, such as processing their emotions, exploring personalities, strengthening relationships, and managing anger.

The program officially launched in January 2019 back when the women’s relationships with the sewing machines were timid and fearful. Audrey played an active role as the women’s cheerleader. The women now mock her and her constant willingness and energy to help. Whenever they’d ask her to bring them fabric, needles, or scissors, or to fix a sewing machine, Audrey would energetically respond and scurry around the center. “I was like the server slash mechanic,” Audrey explains.

Audrey often ties scrap pieces of fabric onto her backpack to help her remember which supplies she needs to buy for the women. Multiple times a week, she hops on her bike and rides to the nearby city, the little pieces of fabric blowing in the wind. 

Through her role, Audrey developed intimate friendships with the women. Every day she has a new story to share about her 40 women, friends, sisters, co-sewers and role models. 

Stories of the women hooting with joy after finishing each article of clothing (which means these explosive ceremonial chants happened at least 200 times). Sometimes they’d even dance on the table to celebrate. Staying up to early hours of the morning talking about sewing, brainstorming new clothing designs, and researching patterns with her host sister Fatiha. Practicing runway walks with kids and women while listening to Drake before the big fashion show. At this same fashion show, one of the most dedicated sewers named Fatima was so focused on showing off her clothes that she arrived to the runway accidentally wearing two different sandals.

These joyously shrieking, mismatched sandaled, dedicated women have not only captured Audrey’s focus but also the attention of others in the community. A four-year-old named Khadija is now jealous of her 12-year-old cousin Zakiya who has already learned embroidered beading. During the holiday at the end of Ramadan when it’s a cultural tradition to wear new clothes, half the community was outfitted with new looks, complements of the sewing training center

Sewing has captivated the women themselves, too. “We can’t sleep anymore, they laugh, our minds are too busy thinking about what we’ll sew next.” One woman dreams of opening a sewing shop in the village to sell her own clothes, fabric, and other supplies. She wants to be able to create her own income, become self-dependent and live a “relaxed” life. “I want the people who taught me to sew to be proud of me,” she smiles as she thinks about the future. One day, she wants Audrey to hear that she has grown from being the sewing-class-jokester to a professional sewer with her own shop. 

Next year, a group of six women will start a sewing cooperative so that they can begin selling their products on a larger scale. They dream of creating a factory in their Middle Atlas Mountain valley so that everyone (the farmers, the children playing on the street, the high schoolers and the city-dwellers) will be decked-out in their designs. “And that’s just the beginning,” they affirm.

After clocking over 250 hours of classes, crafting hundreds of articles of clothing, these women have begun radiating new positive energies.

They’ve transformed the sewing training center from a space of racecar sounds and anxiety to a space that cultivates hope, goal-setting, and celebrations that call for spontaneously using tea trays as instruments.

The women have created an inspiring sisterhood that focuses on embracing their limitless potentials. Despite decades of hard work in their homes, they admit that they’ve rarely experienced outward appreciation. Finally, through the sewing classes, they’ve mustered up their own confidence and realized that they can create their own pride, while others like Audrey and Abdelhaq are cheering them on. “The power of me just saying that I’m proud of them means so much,” Audrey adds.

I, another Peace Corps Volunteer, once admitted to the women that I can’t sew a thing. “Yes you can,” they encouraged me, “you just have to start.” I guess that’s all it really takes: simply starting. The 40 women started a project without realizing exactly what it entailed. Without realizing that it would fuel their confidence and build a culture of safety, creativity, and celebration. “The women never want to leave the sewing center now,” Audrey laughs. “I physically have to push them out the door.”

After six months, it’s hard to part with an environment that evokes freedom, yelps of pride, and table-top jives. But at the end of each class, these women return to their homes, illuminating their communities with newfound hopes and dreams: an unexpected result from once spooky alien sewing machines.