We estimate that Maria will need a minimum of $6,000 to go to India to help the victims of the sex trafficking trade, for food, lodging, materials, air travel, registration and visa and vaccination fees and other expenses.
Those of you who are eager and impatient to contribute ASAP – we have already heard from many of you and thanks – can do so simply and right now by sending checks to Maria Wulf/India Trip, c/o Post Office box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816. We realized last night that we need to get started right away, even though there will be a number of ways to contribute.
For those who missed it, Maria has been invited to travel to Calcutta, – re-named Kolkata, India – next February to help formerly enslaved sex workers and victims of sex trade trafficking learn to make potholders and also learn some fiber arts to help them find ways of taking care of themselves and earning a living.
The organizers of the program, the Village Experience, believe that Maria’s potholders can help these women – many of whom have been kidnapped from distant countries and enslaved in India – learn how to make something they can sell and help them provide for their children.
I don’t know of a better cause that I have ever been lucky enough to be associated with. Maria is touched beyond words by the invitation. We figure the trip will cost at least $6,000, possibly a bit more. We are looking at every possible way to keep expenses down.
Maria has the greatest heart and most generous spirit of anyone I have known in my life. Kolkata is the home of Mother Teresa and her great work. We have a lot of money to raise in a short time, and we need to get going.
It will be a challenging trip for her, India is an amazing, very different place. She is awestruck and humbled by the invitation and we have been talking and calculating to figure out what it will cost and what she will need. She is exploring some possible grant programs and matching grants to see if she can raise some funds, and she will be launching a crowdsourcing page to raise money beyond our blog communities within the week.
I felt we should offer our readers here a chance to contribute first, if they wish.
I got a dozen messages in the last day or so asking how people can help right now. Some options: You can wait for the crowdsourcing, of course, or send a check to our P.O. Box (Maria Wulf, India Journey, Post Office Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816.)
Maria’s potholders have a rich history, she started making them when she re-started her work as an artist after we met in 2007. They were inexpensive, a way of earning some money as she went through the very frightening experience of deciding to make her work a full-time job. Her potholders made this possible, they have evolved along with her, she has sold thousands of them, kept them inexpensive so that people could afford them.
The potholders hold a special place in our lives together and in her art, and now they will take her even further, to India. Life is amazing.
Once in awhile, people suggest she should abandon the low-profit potholders in favor of her bigger pieces, she will never do that, they are the heart and soul of her emergence as an artist, they have been sold all over the world.
In a sense, those potholders have been the symbol and mainstay of her art, enabling her to make quilts, hanging pieces, tote bags, scarves and other fiber works, all from discarded clothing, just like the people who inspired her work, the Gee’s Bend quilters of Alabama.
People who wish to contribute via Paypal can do so anytime by using her Paypal account and ID there – [email protected] (please indicate the money is for India) or by waiting a few days and contributing through her crowdsourcing page. I will be posting regular updates about the trip and so will she. And checks to the Post Office Box will always be acceptable.
We need to have most, if not all of the money raised by November.
I will be contributing whatever I can and several local businesses have already contacted us and asked if they could help. Heather at Over The Moon has offered to contribute $2 for every pair of socks sold at her store (518 677-3005). I will contribute all of the proceeds from any of my photographs sold at my Portrait Show in September at the Round House Cafe, and some other local businesses have their own ideas and are figuring them out.
Our community is already rallying to Maria, a neighbor brought over $100 in cash this morning.
Maria has already received some contributions in the mail, and we haven’t even asked yet. This is wonderful, an important cause. The plight of the sex workers, some slaves, has touched people all over the world.
People have asked if I am going, and I am not. This is her trip, not mine, her thing. It wouldn’t be right for me to go, although I’d love to see India one day. I think it could change her life in so many important ways, and it is a wonderful vindication of her art and her spirit. Those women in India will love her, as I do, and so many other people do. She is a wondrous teacher.
This journey, this passage to India, is what her heart and soul is about.
So if you wish to help right away, we are eager to get started. the P.O. Box is a good way to do it, we will post the other options as they become available, I believe this must happen and will happen and we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for the good wishes and support already shown.
It will be a wonderful journey, and she will share it with all of us in many ways – blogging, photographs, quilts and potholders, and just think of the fabrics she will bring home. We need $6,000. This is the official launch, blog readers first. Maria Wulf/India Trip, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816.