This man lives in a town called Marble
Or "Sagyin" in Burmese. The town is in the shadows of a huge marble mountain. Everybody in the region works in the marble trade, and 99% of them made marble buddha statues. Huge ones, medium ones, tiny ones.
Now imagine you're making a buddha statue. You'll start with a hunk of marble, and you'll lop off the corners to make the shoulders. If it's a big buddha, that's quite a big chunk that goes to waste.
This is where we come in. We scoop up the waste pieces and make little accessories with them. We make soap dishes, toothbrush cups and jars. For hotel clients we make trays and little vanity pots for the bathroom. We're limited by the size of the shoulder-chunk, but that's big enough for lots of things.
As is the case for most people in Myanmar, life has become increasingly challenging since the 2021 military coup. Lots of the Buddhas carved in Sagyin used to be exported to Thailand and China, but trade routes are now complicated and orders have slowed.
Zaw, who runs the workshop behind our products, is often uncontactable for weeks on end. Sagyin is a sticky conflict zone and frequently it isn't safe to stay at home–he flees with his family to a makeshift home in the jungle until the fighting calms.
And to add insult to injury, Sagyin was right on top of the epicentre of March's earthquake, so many of the workshops and homes were destroyed.
It is not an easy life by any measure.
But consistent income helps. Knowing that we will place orders with them helps. Knowing that they can use up scrap marble helps. Knowing that we will get cash to them, somehow, helps
Lots of our marble has been out of stock for a while. Most of it is back. Grab it now, as we never quite know when we'll get more of it.
