From Scraps to Quilts

What is important is faith expressing itself in love. – Galatians 5:6 (NLT)

“It’s here, Arlene!” My teammate came through our front door carrying a huge package that she had brought all the way from the U.S. She said her goodbyes and left me to open the box with Dewi, who was curious to see what I was so excited about. We sat on the floor together and carefully removed layers of tape to open the box. Inside were two patchwork quilts.

I caught my breath when I saw them for the first time. To some people, it might seem ridiculous to send heavy quilts to the tropics, but to me they were beautiful. It wasn’t just the careful workmanship that was evident in every stitch, but also what they represented. These quilts were a part of my history, my heritage. What a joy to hold them for the first time after many months of anticipation!

Dewi sat there silent for a while on the floor with me, holding the quilts and examining them. As we admired the handiwork, I told Dewi about early American pioneer women who would take old scraps of cloth, or even old feed sacks, and make something beautiful out of them in order to keep warm in the winter.

Although Dewi had never experienced winter weather, she seemed to understand the significance of the quilts. I explained how quilts like these were family heirlooms passed down from generation to generation—pieces of art. I told her about the various patterns and how some areas were known for certain styles, patterns or colors in their quilts. Ladies would gather around quilting tables and talk while stitching. It was work, entertainment, art and relationship, all rolled up into one.

Dewi listened with delight. “This really fits with the Kantoli personality,” she said. “We love to work with our hands, and we have the patience to do something like this.” Then she paused and looked at me. “Can you teach me how to make a quilt?”

How could I resist? “I don’t have the faintest idea,” I laughed, “but we’ll learn together.”

I had never made a quilt before, but I knew how to sew and thought that we could learn together. Denalia was the textile capital of Indonesia, and I had noticed blocks of kiosks selling fabric in all colors and sizes. I gave Dewi a little money and suggested she pick out some cloth and batting when she had a chance. In the meantime, she asked if she could take the quilts home to her village to show her friends and relatives.

“Sure, Dewi,” I agreed. “See what they think! I’m sure they’ll love them.”

A week or so later, a group of men I recognized from Dewi’s village came to my door. They were reserved and very polite and had brought back the quilts from the ladies in North Carolina. I invited them inside for some tea. One of the men, Dadang, was Dewi’s brother-in-law. He made a living by selling soup on the side of the road. His little one-man business netted less than 25 cents a day. On such a meager income, he struggled to provide for his wife and five children. It was one of Dadang’s boys who had been circumcised the day I visited Dewi’s village for the second time. Also in the group that day was Ayung, who had been out of work for a long time. Then there was Indah, a leader in the village. He was older and more reserved, a man of few words.

A few minutes into our conversation, one of the men reached for a bag I hadn’t noticed. To my surprise, he unfolded a replica of one of the North Carolina quilts—made with the fabric that Dewi had bought at the market with the money I’d given her! I examined their work with amazement. Considering this was their first attempt at quilting with absolutely no training, it was wonderful!

These men were serious. Their fields and gardens weren’t bringing in enough money to educate their kids or meet their basic health needs. They had taken the initiative to make a pattern and figure out how to stitch the quilt together, even though a craft like this was not found in Indonesia at the time. They worked as a team to get it done, and they enjoyed the process. They were motivated to learn more.

Dewi’s colors were not what I would have chosen, but color preference is a cultural thing. At this point, the important issue was not the color but the quality of the work. Their stitching was reasonably good, and I was convinced that, with a little help, they could become masters of the trade. I decided on the spot that it was worth investing some time to help Dewi and her relatives develop their sewing and quilting skills. As I praised the men for their diligence, they beamed with pride and satisfaction. They had traveled all day, at their own expense, to hear my verdict, and my positive response encouraged them.

While the men relaxed in our living room and drank their tea, I went into our baby room and found a little patchwork quilt my mom had sent me. It was store-bought, but the colors were great. I gave it to the men and suggested they try to duplicate it. As they left, I promised to try to find a buyer for the first quilt they had made.

It wasn’t long before Dewi’s friends and relatives completed their second quilt, then a third. I could hardly keep up with them. The baby quilt they made was delightful and almost as nice as the original. I was amazed by their skill and ingenuity figuring out the patterns. Before long, they were pumping out baby quilts one after the other. Indonesians love to wrap their babies in blankets, even if it’s warm.

It is one thing to make a quilt and quite another to sell it—especially if the colors aren’t so good or the quality is questionable. Nevertheless, I took a few of the first quilts to some stores in the city, not knowing what to expect. Some shop owners agreed to place them in their windows on consignment.

Some of those early quilts were quite crazy-looking. I let everyone do what they wanted as far as colors because they were just learning and were using a lot of scrap material. They kept copying that original quilt in different colors. One quilt they brought me was so garish, I was convinced no one would buy it. The dominant color was a bright purple with accents in lime green, orange, yellow, and pink. I hid it on a shelf in the back of our storage room.

One day my new teammate Rhonda arrived in Indonesia with her husband and two small children. Rhonda was anxious to set up her home. They had not brought anything with them from the U.S. except their clothes. “Do you know where I can buy some bedcovers?” Rhonda asked, checking her long list. “I want some blankets that are bright and cheerful.” I wondered to myself what her definition of “cheerful” might be.

“A group I’m working with has a few quilts for sale,” I responded. “They’re starting to sell quite quickly, so we only have a handful of them. I’m not sure you’ll like them.”

I showed Rhonda the quilts that were stacked in the corner of our living room. She immediately expressed a genuine interest. “Wait, I have one more,” I said as I darted for the storage room. “It is really wild!”

When Rhonda saw the quilt with bright, clashing colors, she loved it. With a big Texan laugh, she bought it on the spot. The Lord had sent Rhonda to Indonesia to buy that crazy quilt! When I saw it on her bed later, I got a really good chuckle. Rhonda was fun and funky, and the quilt fit her personality. Beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder, and she appreciated beauty that I had not seen.

And then it started to happen—the quilts began to sell like hotcakes. Dewi and I allocated the proceeds to cover the cost of materials and the labor of each person involved. Each time a quilt sold, we I saved a little to invest in more cloth for the expanding project. Dewi helped me with the calculations. She established fair compensation levels for all the workers, and we had a small notebook to record expenses and income.

Before long, we could hardly keep up with the demand. We went into the city with some of our savings and purchased a treadle sewing machine. It looked like something that my great-grandmother would have used a century ago—a black machine with gold trim, made in China. It cost about $100 and was simple, strong and easy to repair. It didn’t require electricity, but we could install a small power unit later for $30 or $40.

Part of the fun and challenge of the quilting project was training Dewi in her color choices. Because our customer base was largely wealthy Indonesians with Westernized tastes and foreigners passing through Denalia, color combinations were important if we wanted the quilts to sell. We spent hours together walking through crowded downtown bazaars looking for the right textures and colors of cloth. Before long, many of the shop owners knew me by name. Because no one could pronounce the “arl” sound at the beginning of my name, they called me Lina. I was good at bargaining, and the shop owners soon realized I was no pushover. All it took was a few sentences in the Kantoli language, and they knew I’d been in the country a long time.

Shopping in those alleys was actually a bit dangerous. It was very crowded, and people pressed in from every side. There was no fire marshal and no regulations to enforce. Once, a fire broke out in the alley where Dewi and I did most of our shopping. Someone shouted, “Api! Fire!” and triggered a huge stampede as people clamored to get out. Some died in the fire and others were trampled.

After each shopping expedition, Dewi and I came home with huge bags of cloth. We recorded what we had spent and checked our budget, making sure we had plenty left over for wages. The men of Banteng came back frequently with more and more quilts. I knew they were spending a lot of time and money traveling back and forth to the city and wondered if there was a more efficient way to handle things. Steve and I talked it over. We decided that for a season we would transform our home into a production center. Only bedrooms would be off-limits to the quilters. Dewi’s relatives could stay and work for a whole week at a time, then return to their village.

Behind our rented house was an old storage room. Steve and some of the men cleared it out and painted it. It was small, but sufficient for our needs. In it, we placed our first two sewing machines. A couple of the men had some experience with sewing machines, so they got the assignment. Our living room was the cutting, arranging and hand-stitching area. The men had their meals together, and some of them slept in our home. Others slept in Dewi’s house or with other friends in the city.

Meanwhile, Dewi and I designed new quilts, organized our ideas, shopped for fabric and supplies and kept track of the finances. We were on a roll, and nothing could stop the momentum. It was too late to turn back! News of what was going on in my home started to spread by word of mouth.

There was a lot of laughter around the house and a festive community atmosphere. Rather than separating work and family life, Steve and I meshed the two together. Our girls were preschoolers, and they loved playing around the quilting tables. It was a wonderful environment for them to learn and grow. Some of the ladies brought their children to work and my kids picked up the Indonesian and Kantoli languages from their playmates. Many of the quilters became like aunts and uncles and they sometimes made little quilts, purses and dolls for the kids to play with. Dewi cooked a huge pot of rice, fish and vegetables each day, and sometimes, as a special treat, we ate chicken.

Some people considered our house chaotic, but the Kantoli people we were ministering to loved it. They felt welcome in the communal atmosphere. I had asked God to surprise me with how He would use me in ministry, and He certainly did that by bringing a village into my living room.

Dadang, the gentle, soft-spoken man who until recently sold soup on the side of the road, had never used a sewing machine in his life, but he was one of the first to learn. I started by teaching him to sew squares together so the corners matched up. I taught him how to make small items like potholders and hot pads, and he soon graduated to larger squares and larger projects. When I told him he was ready to make a large quilt, he was proud of himself and eager to get started. He carefully picked out hot pink and aqua blue cloth and asked if he could stay up late in the shed behind our house and keep practicing his squares. Steve and I said “No problem” and went to bed.

The next morning when the other quilters arrived, Dadang proudly displayed his handiwork. It was absolutely enormous! In fact, it was the size of two king-sized quilts combined. No one could believe that he had completed it overnight.

“You taught me how to put the squares together,” Dadang told me. “But you didn’t teach me how to stop, so I just kept sewing.” All the quilters burst out in laughter. They lovingly called it the “village quilt,” saying that an entire village would be able to sleep under it. I gave it to Dadang because it was too large to sell. He loved it and took it home with him.

The quilting business kept growing, and soon others heard about the opportunity for work at the little house down a crowded street in Denalia. In a city of two million people with an unemployment rate of 25 percent, you can imagine how the word spread. Soon women from Dewi’s village also began asking for work. Since their husbands or relatives were quilting in my house, they felt secure enough to join in on the project. Each day, I would wake up just in time to welcome 15 or 20 people into my living room. In our city there were few, if any, restrictions on conducting business out of one’s home. When people are hungry and half the population is unemployed or underemployed, no one bothers with such regulations and rules.

Some friends in the U.S. who heard about what was going on sent me quilting magazines. As I studied them, I saw pictures of quilting tables—frames on which a large unfinished quilt can be clamped so that it’s easier to do the hand stitching. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Why hold the quilt or spread it out on the floor when it could be stretched over a rack?

We decided to design a quilt rack and call a carpenter. I thought of an older man who had made a little white table for Joy and Sarah and furniture for our porch. Surely, he could figure out how to make a quilting table, even though it would seem strange to him initially. I sent for Mr. Oman, and when he arrived, I showed him a picture of a quilting table from a magazine and gave him some money to buy wood. Within a few days, we had a quilting table in our home and several women around it. Quickly they learned to sew the top of the quilt to the bottom with the batting in between. Some of these women had never held needles before. Each woman had a designated color, and she would pin a little piece of that cloth onto the area she was quilting. Each person was paid based on how many sections they completed.

Dewi kept track of the wages and finances. We were careful to lock up the money at the end of the day. Eventually, I took Dewi to the bank and we opened an account. It was the first time in her life that she had been in a bank. At first, the project didn’t make much money, but over time it started to add up.

The conversations around the quilting table and over the sewing machines energized me. My new friends, who were mostly Muslims from Dewi’s village, felt free to ask me questions about life and faith. In fact, they loved talking about spiritual things. Unlike most Westerners, that’s the world they live in. One of the questions they had was about the Holy Spirit. They had heard that Christians believed in three gods. I explained that we don’t believe in three gods at all, but in one triune God. I loved these conversations, and I went through whatever door the Lord opened.

Around that time, Steve and I began making Sunday visits to an isolated Christian village called Pangon. It was a long drive (close to an hour and a half each way), but we enjoyed worshipping with the small congregation of Kantoli believers.

One day, some Christian women from Pangon came to visit us. They looked around our house and were amazed to see so much activity.

“How many people work here?” one of them ventured.

“I’m not sure. Quite a few—maybe 20 or 30?” I could tell from their expressions that the wheels of their minds were turning.

“Did all these people already know how to sew?”

“Not necessarily. We’re trying to help people who don’t have skills but are willing to learn and work hard. Why?”

“Are these people Muslims?” The group’s apparent spokeswoman lowered her voice, not wanting to be heard by the workers around us. She gazed into my eyes with heart-penetrating sincerity.

“Yes, they are.” I wondered where she was going with her line of questioning.

“We need help, too. There are very few Christians in this part of the island. Our ancestors were forced to establish our own village to survive. We don’t have many opportunities to work because Muslims won’t hire us. It’s good that you are helping Muslims, but what about the people they persecute? Shouldn’t we be helped, too?”

She was right. Weren’t these dear ladies in equal, if not greater, financial need than the men and women working all around us? I explained to the Pangon ladies that I wanted to have a friendship ministry to Muslims to show them the love of Christ, yet I couldn’t dispute their logic. Kantoli Christians, too, were in need, and perhaps the business could bless them as well.

The encounter with the ladies of Pangon shifted the project to a new level. Steve and I decided to employ Christians and Muslims side by side wherever possible. Mixing the two would be a challenge, but it would also be a powerful spiritual experiment. In Indonesian society, believers were sidelined—if not completely ostracized—by the Muslim majority. While there were mosques on every corner, churches were almost never permitted, at least in the rural areas. In the rare event that someone tried to construct a Christian house of worship, it would almost invariably be burned to the ground. After all, this was a Muslim province—not a place for followers of Jesus.

It would be fascinating to see the two worlds meet right there in our own home. Neither group would naturally gravitate toward working with the other, but when people are desperate, they will do almost anything, even if it means sitting next to an infidel at a quilting table. Furthermore, I was not forcing anyone into a church building. I was simply creating a comfortable, honest work environment in my home.

As Steve and I talked it over, a subtle but important shift was taking place in our thinking. Rather than building this effort around Muslims with Muslim leadership, why not build it around Kantoli Christians, a persecuted minority in their own homeland? There were very few of them, but they were here, and they represented the future growth of the church among the Kantoli. Instead of Christians being persecuted by Muslims, we could try to create a place where Christians could be a blessing to Muslims by providing them with jobs. As the two groups worked side by side, barriers might crumble and the truth of the gospel could be communicated more effectively. The day-to-day routine of working and eating together could become a fertile context for spiritual impact.

Before long, believers from Pangon and other areas started joining in. Steve and I were excited by all that was happening. After the initial novelty of Muslims meeting Kantoli Christians for the first time, everyone generally relaxed. Muslims realized Christians were real people with the same needs and hopes. God was clearly opening a wonderful door of opportunity—more than we ever dreamed when we set foot on this land years before. Our home was full of people excitedly cutting cloth, arranging the pieces on the floor, stitching them together and transporting the sheets and padding back to their villages where others could join in the laborious task of hand stitching.

One of the joys of the growing business was watching the quilters develop relationships. The barriers between Muslims and Christians began to melt and conversations flowed from the heart. I saw a new openness in my Muslim friends. And I saw Christians touched with compassion for their Muslim colleagues, rather than fear or resentment toward them.

It would have been difficult for me as a foreigner to make frequent trips to Banteng, Dewi’s isolated village. I looked so out of place as a tall, white, American woman. Even if I had been able to visit frequently, the village leaders would have eventually become suspicious about my presence and motives. The Muslim leaders from the local mosques would have warned the villagers to avoid me, or at least to disregard anything I said, especially if it had to do with matters of faith. Knowing this, God had arranged something remarkable. He had brought the village to me. He had answered my prayer in Dewi’s village: “Lord, surprise me and make me a blessing to these people You love.”