Bag sewer shares success

Small-scale businesses are mushrooming, making it difficult for an enterprise to stand out.

For 62-year-old Felicidad Obejero, she had to shed sweat and tears for her simple business of recycling jute sacks into bags for sale.

Opening a sari-sari store is  so common, she said. She found  sack-making a different challenge.

Today, her small business provides a family income and generates employment for her neighbors.

Obejero, a widow,  said she sees to it that her workers are compensated for their labor so they will be motivated to work.

According to her, building  good relations with her workers helped her sustain the business, which she started during the economic slowdown.

Obejero  said she learned how to make bags out of paper (bulsita) when she was a child because her parents made and supplied them to  several stores in Cebu City.

Their business  collapsed when her parents died.  Her troubles did not end there.

She became a widow at the age of 32 and had to raise  eight children on her own.

That’s when she thought of continuing her parents’ business  of  selling  paper and plastic bags to  support her family.

“Inig ka buntag sayo magluto ko para sa akong mga anak. Inig ka human ako dayon isuroy ang mga sako bags sa siyudad. Lisod kaayo pagbalanse sa oras. Kon di ko molihok wa man pod koy ipakaon nila. Mao’ng ako sila gipasabot nga mabusy gyud ko ug basin di na kaayo ko kaatiman nila (I wake up early to cook food for my children, then I would go to Cebu City to peddle the sack bags. It’s  difficult to balance my  time.  But if I don’t  work,  I won’t be able to feed my children. I explained to them that I would be busy and may  not be able to take care of all their needs),” she said.

Though her sack making business  started to gain ground, lack of capital made progress slow.

Obejero was introduced by her daughter to the micro-finance project of  the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation Inc. (RAFI).

Determined to succeed, she didn’t  hesitate to apply for membership. Later, she became a nanay  or a micro finance client of RAFI.

Her first loan of P5,000 in 2009 went  a long way. She later applied for bigger loans to acquire ten sewing machines to do away with  manual stitching of the bags.

Obejero now gets her supply of used sacks of good quality from big establishments in Cebu, unlike before where she had to buy  sacks from neighbors.

“Sa una lisod kaayo ko. Karon medyo hayahay na gamay. Kon mokugi lang gyud ta ug mag-ampo sa Ginoo, murag ang tanan mahimotang ra gyud (Life is easier today.  If we just work hard and pray to God, everything will fall into place),” she said.

Today, she has 13  employees helping her with the sako bag business.

They  wash the used sacks and dry them. After ensuring that the sacks are clean, they stitch them into bags.

“Dako gyud og tabang ning trabahoa kay mao ra baya ni ang among gisaligan. Mao ra ni ang nagpakaon namo ron kay na-paralyze man gud akong bana (This work is our only source of income after my husband became paralyzed,” said Virginia Cabiluna, a 58-year-old sewer of Obejero.

Obejero has expanded her client base from Cebu province to Dumaguete, Leyte and Butuan in Mindanao.

From living in a  shanty, her family now lives in a  concrete two-storey house in Talisay City, Cebu.

The struggle for self reliance was acheived one sack at a time, benefitting her neighbors as well. /Fatrick Tabada,Ramon Aboitiz Foundation Inc.