YANTIE TAPLO BETELNUT REPLICA ACCESSORIES
Y antie started making her betelnut-lookalike accessories at the end of 2019, a year after leaving her home in West Papua (Indonesia) and moving to Boera village near Port Moresby with her PNG husband Emmanuel Beatty after he completed his studies. She uses a wild round nut called ‘bintangur’, which she paints lime green to look like betelnuts to decorate earrings, necklaces, hair clips, hair combs, key tags and limepots, along
with such other materials as bamboo, coconut shells, yarn, oil palm flowers, beads, feathers and seashells. Although the nut is common where Yantie comes from in West Papua, and is used to make key tags, bilum decorations and ceremonial necklaces, it is more difficult to find at Boera or nearby Edai Town, where she recently moved with her husband and two toddlers. However after posting enquiries on Facebook, she has found sellers at Sogeri. Although her customers love her unique accessories and she can make 5000 per month, Yantie’s commitments as a mother for now have forced her to cut back to 500-1000/month. – Mace Sshop
GEMONA KILA LIME WASTE ABRASIVE SOAP
G emona is a primary school teacher in Tauruba village, Rigo, who started making her abrasive pot-scourer bars as a science project with her students to find a use for the limestone waste and wood ash left in piles around Central coastal villages after seashells are burnt to produce the fine white lime powder consumed with betelnut. Aware that most mothers could not afford to buy commercial soap products such as Axion, or steel wool to scrub their fired pots, Gemona experimented with the leftover lime (calcium hydroxide) material, shaping it into a bar and finding that she could use it to clean a pot “with my bare hands”. In fact, she found that her all-natural product worked better than any of the supermarket dishwashing detergent brands, and was a grease stripper and stain remover too. Gemona is determined to keep developing the bars, along with other products created from the lime waste including a bed-bug killer and a soil pH improver, but intends to run the business as a community enterprise, with an aim to encourage entrepreneurship among young unemployed people. She also helps raise awareness of sustainable environment practices through volunteer youth group Roots and Shoots PNG, linked to the wildlife conservation body Jane Goodall Institute. – Limedust
ABOVE: Grade 4 students from Gabone Primary School at Rigo (Central) work with their environment science teacher Gemona Kila on upcycling lime (seashells) and wood ash waste into biodegradable chemical-free products such as abrasive pot scourers, body scrubs, soil pH improvement lime powder, barbeque bricks, chicken feed calcium supplement, putty gap filler and liquid bed-bug spray.
VOLUME 38 2024
40
Made with FlippingBook Learn more on our blog