Gerehu mothers make it look easy

PEOPLE

By JONATHAN KOH
SOME strong mothers sometimes go to great length in carrying out a certain responsibility to help put food on the table and provide for their families.
Here is the story of two mothers who are the bread winners and financial providers for their respective families in the capital city.
Jenny Nandang is from Morobe. She is in her late 40s and sews and sell meri blouse and dresses for a living. She is an entrepreneur who is very faithful towards her work. She says her husband does not have a job and so she works really hard to make enough money from her sales to provide for him and their children.
“My first son is 20 years old and completed Grade 10 at Don Bosco Secondary School and my daughter is in primary school. I have two children” Nandang says.
She was into her second week of marketing when we approached her for this story.
She regularly sells her dresses but for some personal reasons, she quit marketing some time back but resumed recently.
Her very colorful and stylish dresses range in price from K50 to K100.
“I usually import my materials from a woman in Lae and buy some from the Lava Girl stall at Vision City,” Nandang said.
“I buy materials from these two suppliers and sew these meri blouses”, Nandang says.
Her blouses include Oro tapa designs and other colourful patterns and designs which are very eye-catching.
She has set up a tent and her marry blouse market is right next to the Gerehu Stage 2 bus stop around the big round-about area.
The small entrepreneur says she wants to be a bit choosy with the kind of materials she uses and where she gets them from but that is difficult sometimes.
“I do not want to give money to certain suppliers but that is quite hard. There are not enough local suppliers. We get our supplies from other places when our local mothers and not provide what we need,” she says.
“The Government should provide financial assistance and look seriously into this area so as to support our local mothers to help them venture into this business. We can promote small to medium enterprises (SMEs) but we need financial and other forms of assistance. Good money can be found in this business”, Nandang says.
She is urging other mothers who know how to sew blouses to sew and start selling their creative products.
Like other businesses in the country and the world over, Covid-19 did affect Nandang and others in this kind of small enterprise.
“We usually made good money back then. There was good number of customers who bought our products. We really need to get back into business as Covid-19 has slowed down already. The Government has turned a blind eye and is not very supportive.”
Nandang says the main motivation behind her business is to make it easier for customers, especially mothers and young women to buy things at a safe spot and at their doorsteps.
On a good trading day, the Morobe mum makes K400 – K500.
Another woman, mother of three, Roselyn Tapus, says her husband has left her and she struggles to do her marketing to support her family.
The woman from Mulitaka in Enga is in her late 30s and sells second hand clothes for a living.

Her clothes range from stylish hoodies, jumpers, women’s trousers, blouses to children’s trousers and blouses.
She says the money she makes from her sales is used on mobile phone credits and the other necessities.
Tapus says her two children are in the village and some of the money she makes is sent to them. She says she had saved money to attend a technical and vocation training school to get a regular job but chose not to.
“I have certificates, but I have observed that I would wait every two weeks for a fortnightly pay unlike my clothes marketing in which I see money every day,”, Tapus says
Her range of clothes sell for anything from K5 to K20 and she makes up to K200 on a really good and busy day. A wholesale outlet at Badili keeps her small retailing business going.
Like Nandang, she says wants to help people buy clothes at a safe and secure spot and so she chose the area near the Gerehu Stage 2 basketball courts.
Nandang and Tapus, like other hardworking PNG mothers, are seen at work daily here at Gerehu to provide for their families.

• Jonathan Koh is a freelance writer