As sea ails, it's sewing machines to the rescue

Women in a Sri Lankan village are given a leading role in an environmental project

A fact-finding journey across Sri Lanka these days might well be expected to take in the country's modernization and its port city construction, partly undertaken by Chinese engineers and workers.

However, the trip I made with other journalists in mid-March took us to very different kinds of places, and ones that were decidedly non-touristy, to see common village people whose lives are at the crossroads of history and modernity.

One of our stops was a small village named Serrakkuliya, on the country's west coast. We were taken there to observe the efforts United Nations Environment Program and its local partners are making to protect the region's biodiversity in general, and one animal in particular - the dugong.

But since the dugong, known as sea pig or sea cow in different waters of the world, is such a mysterious animal - so mysterious that none of my interviewees in Sri Lanka had even seen a live one - our team of international reporters ended up talking to people whose humble existence probably stood an even slimmer chance of getting media attention if it was not for the endangered animal.

They were fishermen and their wives.

We saw the wives first - six of them were bent over sewing machines when our bus stopped in front of their nondescript bungalow. Inside, shirts and skirts - mostly for children - hung from a clothes line, and colorful fabrics adorned one wall.

The six women are from six families out of 10 that have taken part in a UNEP project that encourages fishermen to give up illegal fishing by providing their families with an extra source of income - sewing. The project is financed by the Global Environment Facility, an independent international financial entity providing funding to environmental projects worldwide.

Sewing machines are provided to those who join. The bungalow we visited belongs to one participating family, who agreed to convert part of their living quarters into the sewing studio. The fact that the bungalow sits by the roadside may help when it comes to selling the clothes they make, since most of the final products are sold to fellow villagers.

One of the woman, Sachini Kanchana, said that her husband earns 800 rupees ($5.30) a day using a legal fishing net, a third less than he could make if he used an illegal net. That means 12,000 rupees less a month. The family of four - she and her husband have two teenage children - live on a simple diet that costs them 28,000 rupees a month, she said.