Crises present opportunities.

Last year?s Typhoon Pepeng, which turned around and pummeled Northern Luzon like a Pacquiao one-two punch, gave mudslide evacuees and a number of marginalized, stay-at-home women a chance to learn new skills or improve old ones to augment or replace lost income.

A friend of volunteer Toottee Chanco-Pacis, on learning she was teaching some women crochet as an alternative means of livelihood, joked that she could call her group ?Grandma?s Hookers? because Toottee once ran a cookie stall in Baguio City called Grandma?s Cookies.

Toottee, a retired teacher and a painter by avocation, says, ?The women from Santo Niño, Tublay, who were housed temporarily at Paoad Elementary School in Benguet asked for help, specifically for yarn, so they could knit or crochet to augment their income ?they lost their chayote patches and piggeries.

?I joined the volunteers of Team Café (based at Café by the Ruins). Right away, I responded because this is up my line ? I have had a crochet goods business for many years aside from my home-based baked goods business. With the initial donations from friends and myself, I delivered these goods, and the women used the threads to make finished products according to my specifications.

I promised to do marketing for them. They were paid for their labor per piece, not a daily wage. Whatever we got from sales went back to them in terms of more materials, including reading glasses and hooks.?

After the women left the evacuation center, some went back to old sources of living. As Team Café donated pigs to Santo Niño, many found these businesses more profitable than crochet.

Toottee discovered later that people in highlands, who did a lot of farming and rough work, were less adept in finer crafts than lowlanders. Soon, women from La Trinidad, a valley, heard of the crochet project and also asked for help.

Toottee found many skilled in crochet among these Trinidad women. Through entrepreneur Lilia Narvaez, the grand old lady of La Trinidad at age 80 plus, a function room and lanai in Narvaez?s place was used as work space for the women.

Toottee says, ?The women are young and old. They mostly care for children or grandchildren. They are housewives who need something to do while the kids are in school or taking a nap. Crochet for them is something profitable, not just a hobby.?

She has sold at a Brent School bazaar and in a free booth offered by Senator Pia Cayetano during her Pinay in Action fun run March 13.

The footsies (bedroom slippers), face and hand towels, toilet and tissue paper holders, shopping bag, handbags, pot holders, bonnets, mufflers, throw pillow covers, glass holders, pitcher and creamer holders, all products suitable for the Cordillera and other countries with a temperate climate, have a starting price of P50 and can go as high as P500.

They make good gifts for overseas Filipinos who may find a one-of-a-kind Afghan throw or bedspread a fortune at Neiman Marcus or Nordstrom (high-end shops in the US).

On leave from Bible school where she teaches Christian ethics, Toottee, who wants to get back in the groove of painting, is looking for someone responsible and sincerely interested in the women?s welfare to take over.

The job entails giving the ladies thread and instructions, paying them, recording, then marketing to individual friends and supporters.

These friends are not in dire need of these goods, but instead of giving outright cash to the women, they buy the products, knowing they are helping.

Toottee says, ?Many buy these things not only for their practical use but these items bring back memories when lola [grandma] used to hand crochet everything from coasters to curtains to enliven the home.

?Filipinos after all are sentimental fools. Crochet products last a long time and can be passed from generation to generation.?

The crochet products of Benguet women will soon to be available at the Café by the Ruins souvenir corner on Chuntug Street, Baguio City.