It was quite a weekend. Three of us went to the The Ten Thousand Villages reunion held in Akron,Pa.. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Ten Thousand Villages, it is one of the largest Fair Trade Organizations in the world. They carry everything from tea and chocolate to Oriental rugs. At one time most of their sales occurred at church consignment sales but today, most are done online, as with so many things.
Ten Thousand Villages started back in the 50s when a plain Mennonite woman, Edna Ruth Byler, wanted to do something to help the woman she’d worked with in Puerto Rico when she and her husband were there as church workers. When she got home she began selling some of the needlework the Puerto Rican women made. Over the years, her husband collected a significant number of items when he traveled internationally for MCC, enough for her to have a small gift shop in her basement. After he died, she used his contacts to stock her basement and traveled around to various plain churches selling items from the trunk of her car. She lived very simply as her concern was making sure the artisans earned a fair living wage, not gaining riches for herself.
My husband was a conscientious objector to war, and when he was drafted in 1959, we went as a couple to Europe, where we were involved in refugee and rebuilding projects. In the summer of 1960, we had the privilege of participating in a Holy Lands tour. One of the places we visited was Jericho, Jordan. We visited a Palestinian refugee camp where the men loomed cotton material, which the women covered with counted cross-stitch designs. While there, we learned that Mrs Byler supported this project in a small way.
Once we got back to the US in the fall of 1961, I took my mother to visit Mrs B’s gift shop. There, we learned that she had collected all sorts of items she couldn’t sell to the conservative churches, so my mother decided we’d load up our car and have a small International Gift Festival at our church to help support her. That first sale was so successful that we did it the next year and the next and the next. Eventually, MCC caught the vision of including job creation as part of their refugee and material aid programs. Today, Ten Thousand Villages is a separate organization and has become one of the largest fair trade organizations in the world, focused on guaranteeing fair living wages and better living conditions for those with whom they work.
How we do small things is how we do big things, as my son-in-law tells his students. This is a truly important principle that could change the world if we all adopted it. How we do small things is how we do big things. Mrs B. never even considered that her little gift shop would spawn a worldwide movement that would counter the greed of multinationals. All she wanted to do is what she could do on her own. Nor did we have any such aspirations when our little church decided to help her in our small way. Gradually, her vision was picked up by other churches, which then inspired MCC to include a jobs creation program as the natural extension of the work in refugee camps and war-torn regions. Not only that, but her vision of providing a fair living wage has been picked up by many other church groups, and even some multinationals have developed their own fair trade brands.
Who knows how we might transform the world into a better, more caring place if we each truly believed that the way we do small things is the way we do big things. After all, all really effective organizations like Habitat for Humanity, Mennonite Disaster Service, Oxfam, and Ten Thousand Villages started small, growing only as they learned how to incorporate their original desire to do something good with what they had. And the important thing is not that what we do grows into some significant movement but that we keep doing our small things with honesty and integrity.
How we do small things is how we do big things. Remember that and live with joy and gratitude.