Circle
of Friends
This quilt of West
African materials and  embroidery
is the creation of returned Peace Corps Volunteer Sue Johnson, who
taught second and third grade in Bomi Hills, Liberia from 1966 to 1970.
Like all Peace Corps teachers, she worried about the circumstances
of her children's lives. Just the 50 cents that were required for school
uniforms might keep some children from returning to school as they
grew.
Borrowing from some craft books
that she had brought from home, Sue taught herself and the children
how to embroider the images from life in the village on bags that rice
came in. Among the most dramatic were  the "devil
dancers," distinctly Liberian masquerade figures who have an important
place in guiding village life. When some of the children became more
proficient, she had them embroider the images on "country cloth" bags
and placemats with yarn donated from her mother's elementary school
class in Greensboro, N.C. Making things that "westerners" would
buy.in the capital city led to the Liberia Craft Coop, a business that
employed some of her students and extended Sue's Peace Corps service
by two years.
The nine devil dancers on the quilt
were done as a parting keepsake by an elementary school boy. They hung
separately on the wall for years before Sue Johnson took up quilting,
hoping to bring together some of the materials she had brought from
Liberia. The dancers looked to her like a choir and she saw them naturally
forming a circle. From there, the quilt "just happened," Sue
says.
 Along
the way, Sue started her own business (www.suejohnsonlamps.com)
taking African images and using them in making lamps for her Berkeley,
Calif., business, that she says is run very successfully in a "totally
non-Western way."
When Friends of Liberia began talking
about a teaching project that would send former Peace Corps volunteer
career teachers back to post-war Liberia to train elementary school
teachers, Sue Johnson offered the quilt as a fund- raising vehicle.
"I got so much back from teaching
in Liberia--more than I ever could have given," Sue Johnson says,
that donating the quilt seemed to complete the circle.
|
