Creating Buttons From Tagua
Print this Page- By Stefan Chacon
- Country: Ecuador
- Dates of Service: 2004–2006
I got involved with a community group that was making arts and crafts out of vegetable ivory. And I thought it was a perfect opportunity to turn it into something a little bit bigger-scale, a little bit more industrialized, you could say, and it's a locally available resource, so we started, we started doing research on the button market, actually, which is pretty big—pretty big industry here in Ecuador. Tagua is also known as vegetable ivory. It comes from a palm tree, close family, close relative to coconut. Also African Palm, which is where palm oil comes from. And, once it's dried, you can process it into different objects; you can polish it up, and it looks exactly like ivory.
The biggest obstacle that we have faced here is trying to change a mindset of the people because people aren't used to working in factories and that kind of thing. Work here is, it's agricultural, it's seasonal; you work really hard for a couple weeks and then you just take it easy for a couple of weeks, and the idea of showing up to a job every single day for months on end is really foreign to a lot of people.
I hope that I've made an impression on people to show them the benefits to having a long-term vision, to setting a goal that may be a year away as opposed to just next week, and working hard every day to try to see it through. By setting the example that way, hopefully I've made a positive impact here on the community.
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