RAMOS, TARLAC -- WHILE children her age were playing “patintero” on the street a few meters away, 10-year-old Abigael Cadiente of Barangay Pance here was sitting on a white plastic chair under an old mango tree, deftly using a hooked needle to create a flesh-colored bolero (sleeved sweater) from a ball of crochet cotton.

Abigael, a Grade 5 pupil at the Barangay Pance Elementary School (BPES) here, does not mind she cannot join her friends.

“Nage-enjoy naman po ako dito at para na rin akong naglalaro (I enjoy crocheting, it’s not work for me but play),” she says.

She used the money she earned from her last crochet project, which she finished in two days, to buy the school materials she needs this school year, according to her mother, Imelda, 42, herself skilled at crochet.

The Cadientes’ skill, however, is not unique in this village of nearly a thousand households.

Silvestre Bingat, who had been secretary of the barangay for 13 years, says about 60 percent of Pance’s population could crochet.

He says almost all of them are women-mothers or daughters who want to augment their family’s income by accepting crochet projects.

There are men who also do crochet for a living, though, but their number is insignificant, he says.

Bingat says crocheting has become so much a part of the village’s socioeconomic life that about five years ago it was included in the curriculum for Grades 5 and 6 at the BPES.

Under the national government’s One Town One Product (Otop) program, the making of crocheted products is a showcase industry of the fifth-class municipality of Ramos. The town, located 28.6 kilometers from Tarlac City, has an area of 24.4 square kilometers and a population of 16,889 people or 3,528 households.

A priority program of the national government, Otop aims to create jobs and promote entrepreneurship.

The program places upon the shoulders of city and municipal mayors the responsibility of “identifying, developing and promoting a specific product or service that has competitive advantage.”

It also “supports micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) to manufacture, offer and market distinctive products or services through the use of indigenous raw materials and local skills and talents.”

Saturnina Buccat, owner of D’New Ramos Crochet, one of two microenterprises in Ramos town that is supported by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) under the Otop program, says Barangay Pance’s womenfolk first learned crocheting in 1972 when they worked at the Paniqui Knitting Industry in the nearby Paniqui town, 7 km away. (The other SME is Croknits Crochet and Knitting in the nearby Barangay Guiteb.)

Essentially under a subcontracting arrangement, the crochet workers would be given balls of yarn and a crochet needle to do their crocheting at home. They were then paid for every crochet project that they had finished.

After some time, many Pance women stopped working for two reasons.

First, their town was a flood-prone area and it was very difficult and inconvenient for them to wade through knee-high floodwaters just to procure the materials for their projects and to deliver the completed products, Buccat says.

Second, the competition for projects became tough with the coming of more workers.

Buccat and a few of her companions, however, kept going until the company shut down in the early 1980s. They then went to work for another company in Rosales, Pangasinan. Buccat worked there for years until she decided to work as a domestic helper in Singapore in 1986.

Tragedy struck her family when her eldest son was stabbed dead in 1990, forcing her to go home.

Financially, the times were bad but they were made worse when her husband, Absalom, who used to farm lands, could no longer work because of an eye illness. He underwent eye surgery in 2005 but has remained without work since then.

To make both ends meet, Buccat, 63, resumed work doing crochet projects.

But this time around, she involved the community and became an entrepreneur herself.

With assistance from the DTI in Tarlac City, she put up D’New Ramos Crochet in 2005.

In 2007, her shop was awarded the most outstanding Otop small- and medium-scale enterprise (SME) in Tarlac province for “effectively and efficiently running its operations and contributing to the local economy in terms of employment, sales and investment generation.”

The same year, it represented Tarlac in the Central Luzon-wide search for most outstanding Otop SME.

Buccat says that while the export market was promising, having cornered a number of projects from “big-time” exporters, local trade fairs have remained the best outlets for her products.

She says while preordered items could chalk up a weekly income of between P2,000 and P5,000, her participation in trade fairs could bring in more.

For example, in the week-long “Likha ng Central Luzon” trade fair held last year, she sold P75,000 worth of crocheted items.

Buccat says crocheted products sell at a relatively high price in trade fairs. They are cheaper when sold in the public market or souvenir stores in Baguio City, for example, she says.

That is why crochet jobs done for trade fairs earn workers higher pay than those made for other outlets.

Still, at least among those who have mustered enough self-confidence (and capital) to go into the crochet business as microentrepreneurs, local markets like Baguio City are a good enough place to start.

Felisa Bengco, 36, started her own crochet business two years ago when her 23-year-old daughter, assisted by her other children, put up P15,000 as her starting capital.

She promptly traveled to Baguio City to buy the materials she would need and farmed the jobs out to 30 crochet workers of Pance.

Ever since, every Friday, she would go to Mine’s View Park in Baguio to sell her wares of about 200 pieces of crocheted blouse, bolero, undergarments, etc.

She says that even though the prices of raw materials have gone up—for instance, a kilo of yarn, worth P100 two years ago, now costs P180—the selling prices of her items have remained the same.

“Hindi kami nagtataas ng presyo kasi ayaw ng mga suki namin na nagtataas kami ng presyo (We don’t hike our price because our clients wouldn’t like that),” she says.

Like many skilled crochet workers in Ramos town, particularly in Barangay Pance and Guiteb, Bengco started crocheting when she was still a child and worked under Buccat, whom they acknowledge as the “pinaka-leader” (ultimate leader).

Buccat’s contemporary, Rosita Espino, 67, says she had been doing crochet since she was 15 years old.

When her eight children were old enough, Espino says, she taught them crocheting so they could help her.

They continued to help her until the day they got married. Espino says crocheting helped tide her family over the lean years. “Mahirap ang buhay noon. Kung hindi kami maggagantsilyo hindi kami kakain (Life was hard then. If we didn’t do crochet jobs we wouldn’t be able to eat),” she says.