Two northern Michigan women are using their local connections to transform a village halfway around the world.

Marie Eckstein of Charlevoix and Lin Alessio of Traverse City helped launch and run Red Dirt Road, a nonprofit organization training Cambodian women in the village of Tramung Chrum to earn a living wage as seamstresses. Eickstein visited the country in 2011 after retiring from a corporate career at Dow Corning Corporation in search of “some purpose in life and a way to give back.”

In the small impoverished village of 600 with no running water or electricity, Eckstein met a group of women who’d been gifted sewing machines by the Harpswell Foundation. In Cambodia, which is still reeling from the devastating effects of the Killing Fields, the only survival option for many rural villagers is to send their women away to the capital city of Phnom Penh to work in brutal conditions in garment sweat shops for $1.50 per day. The women in Tramung Chrum were fortunate enough to have their own sewing equipment, allowing them to stay with their children and work. However, they had no market for their products.

“That’s how it started,” says Eickstein of the formation of Red Dirt Road. “I was so impressed with Saly (one of the lead village seamstresses) and the other women. They can’t read or write, but they can sew. They’ve got what it takes to do a business, but they didn’t have the business skills. I’m a business person, so I said, ‘Let’s see what we can do.’”

Eckstein began importing the women’s products to sell here in northern Michigan, sending 100 percent of the profits back to Tramung Chrum. However, she quickly realized that customers were looking for more Westernized scarves, clutches, handbags and shawls than what the women were producing. She asked Alessio, who owns Interlochen Perennial Farms and is a former art gallery owner and educator, to come to Cambodia to teach the women to sew high-end styles that would sell in America.

“I had never traveled abroad before, but I got my little gutless body on a plane and 36 hours later I was in the sweltering heat of Cambodia in a truck headed to a remote area,” Alessio recalls, chuckling. Under Alessio’s tutelage, the women began producing beautiful, high-quality products that boosted sales and drew the attention of international designers.

Over the next four years, Alessio and Eckstein helped Red Dirt Road grow to employ 11 women as full-time seamstresses. The company has sold thousands of bags, according to Eckstein, both online and at local stores including Wildflowers in Glen Arbor and Color Wear in Charlevoix. Every penny of the products sold goes back to the women of Tramun Chrum, who split half of the profits among themselves and put the other half into a village improvement fund. That fund has helped pay for village latrines and gardens, and is now funding English lessons for the village children.

“Cambodians can earn much more money if they learn English, because they can work in the tourism industry,” says Alessio. “The whole village gains by these women learning these skills and by having Red Dirt Road there.”

The women’s next goal is to expand the program and replicate it in other villages – and they hope to get Traverse City’s support to do so. Red Dirt Road is looking now for retail partners in both Traverse City and Petoskey, and is gearing up for a public exhibit sponsored by Traverse City’s Crooked Tree Arts Center next week aimed at bringing attention to the organization.

Award-winning documentary filmmaker Rodney Rascon produced a 14-minute film about the project called “Red Dirt Road: The Film.” The movie, which beat out 300 other titles at the recent International Deauville Green Awards Festival in France for a Grand Prix prize, will screen hourly for free at Crooked Tree July 26-31 from 10am to 8pm. Eckstein and Alessio will also mount an interactive public exhibit during those hours that includes a full-scale replica of the villagers’ sewing workshop, colorful reams of Cambodian silk and photographs of the village, and a variety of Red Dirt Road products for sale.

“We want to share this amazing story with Traverse City, so people can see what we can do when we work together,” says Alessio. “We’re not a big corporation with a ton of money behind us. But this (project) shows we can all make a difference.”

Photo credit: Rodney Rascona