Marie Jean buys me some fruit

Marie Jean

Currently I'm working on a video production of the making of a bilum. It takes several weeks to weave a bilum so one of the handicraft mothers, Marie Jean, comes in every two days or so and we do a few minutes filming each time. Every time she comes the bilum has got a little bit bigger and in a few weeks I will have all the footage I need to edit down to 2-3min web piece.
Whenever Marie Jean comes in for her filming sessions she  brings me a few bananas, some cucumbers and maybe an orange - as a gift. I had assumed they came from her garden. Today I learned that Marie Jean doesn't have a garden, she buys the fruit at the market . You may think that there's nothing remarkable about that, until you learn a little more about her life.
She lives in one of the settlements (shanty towns) surrounding Hagen.  The settlements are dangerous, lawless, often violent and extremely unpleasant - overcrowded, dirty, unsanitory with no real water supply or sewage systems. She lives there in what we would call a shack . Her husband left some time ago,  her son in law died from AIDS and Marie Jean is now looking after her own daughter who is HIV positive.
She survives. She sews clothes to sell at the market in Hagen (with the sewing skills she learnt at the Handicraft Group) and she makes some money from her bilums.


This woman, who has next to nothing, is spending her own money in the market to buy fruit gifts for me.


It is a humbling experience.
Very.