March 28, 2024

Changing Lives On The Red Dirt Road

July 22, 2016

Friends Marie Eckstein and Lin Alessio have several careers between the them.

Eckstein worked in management at Dow Corning in Flint for over 30 years, then spent several more years at East Jordan Iron Works before retiring to work as a volunteer, helping women in third-world countries.

Alessio was an educator at Detroit Public Schools, owned a trio of art galleries, and has owned Interlochen Perennial Farm for the past 21 years.

Eckstein had traveled internationally frequently with her job; Alessio is a self-proclaimed “wimp” when it comes to flying, and — until recently anyway — had never left the U.S.

But now, these two friends are working together on a project called Red Dirt Road, a venture that’s taken them from northern Michigan to Cambodia to make a difference in the lives of 11 women.

REMOTE INSPIRATION

Eckstein’s connection to Cambodia came about through Laura Asiala, a friend she’d worked with at Dow Corning who now lives in Washington D.C.

“Laura introduced me to [physicist/novelist/educator] Alan Lightman and his Harpswell Organization,” Eckstein said. “He was taking a trip to Cambodia to check on his work there and invited me to meet him there to see what he does with his foundation to empower women. I was looking for something to do that wasn’t corporate, that had more purpose.”

On that trip, they visited Tramung Chrum, the rural village that would become the focus of Red Dirt Road. There, Eckstein met a woman named Hab Saly and several other seamstresses. Saly had taken six months of sewing lessons that Harpswell had sponsored to empower her with a skill. Saly discovered she had quite a talent for the craft.

The remote village setting and the women’s passion for creating beautiful objects in spite of their difficult living conditions really stuck with Eckstein, who would return home with several garments and a desire to do more to help.

EXPANDED IDEAS

Back in northern Michigan, Alessio and Eckstein met when Alessio helped Eckstein design her home garden. As their friendship evolved, they found common ground.

“Marie eventually showed me some clothing she’d brought back from a village she was visiting in Cambodia,” Alessio said. “These tiny, size-three pieces that were heavily beaded, just gorgeous. She wanted to do something with them, but I knew there was no Western market for them.”

Upon hearing Eckstein’s stories of the women sewing in the Cambodian village, Alessio saw something familiar in their situation. To get work, the women would travel far from their families, to Phnom Penh, where they often would work for as little as a few dollars for an entire day.

“I myself had worked in the inner city for a long time, so I knew the challenges that impoverished people could have,” she said.

Eckstein invited Alessio to meet her in Cambodia, where one of the goals had become to help these women work from their own village. It was Saly’s dream to start a sewing company; Lightman’s organization was the first step, and Red Dirt Road would be the expansion of that effort.

INDEPENDENT WOMEN

Alessio bravely flew over to Cambodia on her own, transferring through various modes of transportation with written instructions from Eckstein.

“I arrived in Cambodia, and the very next morning I was in a van going down this bumpy red dirt road with these vast landscapes opening up before me,” Alessio said. “We got to a small, brightly colored dwelling, and all of these women came tumbling out to meet us.”

Through an interpreter, Alessio used her art background to talk with the women about their sewing work, explaining the ideas she’d put together about how they could expand their work into something that would be more marketable, to benefit the women’s families and their village. “The women never had education or even proper tools.

They were sewing with big old rusty scissors, no electricity, treadle sewing machines, and irons filled with hot charcoal,” Alessio said. “But they had tenacity. I realized this was an opportunity to help people who wanted to achieve something.”

“Soon, our first purses, made of wonderful Cambodian silk, were born,” she continued. “And while this story is of course heartwarming and helps the women be independent, the products also have to stand on their own — people have to want to buy them simply because they’re beautiful, and they are.”

SOLID SUPPORT

Eckstein and Alessio stayed in the village with the women as honored guests, dining on rice and other food cooked over an open flame and sleeping in the best quarters in the village, which still had only square holes in the walls for windows and required sleeping under a mosquito net.

“If it rained, you got rained on,” Eckstein said. “That’s just how it is there.”

The main focus after redirecting the women’s skills was to solidify the business model.

“We treat this as though there’s a production company in Cambodia that Saly runs, and then we take her products and sell them for her,” Eckstein explained. “We’re like her sales and marketing division — we sell at retail shops and online, and neither Lin nor I take a salary right now. We are paying our own expenses, and the profits go back to the women and to a fund for their village.”

“It’s technically Saly’s business, and we’re supporting her,” Alessio added.

VILLAGE OF CHANGE

Red Dirt Road currently works with 11 seamstresses in Saly’s village, and now that basic operations are underway, the organization is readying for their next step: expansion.

“We’d like to employ more women in Cambodia, moving on to other villages where the women have the same challenges,” Eckstein said. “We’ve helped Saly achieve her dream, and I feel like we can do the same for others. I spent 33 years in the corporate world, but in this new role, I feel like I’m getting more than I’m giving. This is my chance to make a difference.”

“I think all of us in the U.S. are truly blessed,” Alessio added. “When you realize these people are no different than you, they just weren’t fortunate to have been born in a developed country, it makes you want to help. And when you empower people, you can change one village, one person at a time.”

For more information on Red Dirt Road, visit reddirtroad.co. A film about the project, directed by Rodney Rascona, also titled Red Dirt Road, can be viewed on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/165357134.

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