Gil Asakawa'sWRITING SAMPLES Back
to Index of Writing Samples This
article ran in the Boulder
Daily Camera on June 17, 2003.
|
 Fanja Rakotonirina adjusts baskets at her stand during the Boulder International Festival on Sunday. She is the owner of Tropical Items Madagascar, an import shop that sells goods at the Boulder Outdoor Market and other street fairs. (Daily Camera photo by Carmel Zucker) |
But there they are. Fanjarivo Rakotonirina and her husband, Georges Raelisaona, owners of Tropical Items Madagascar, are spending every weekend through October at the market, when they're not selling their products at area festivals.
"They're really, really nice people," says Steve Wallis, founder of the Boulder Outdoor Market. "We focus on local arts and crafts but we permit some importers, including Tropical Items Madagascar. They do well because their things are beautiful and their prices are really good — they sell dresses for $12, or straw hats for $10 that would sell at Banana Republic for $70."
You don't even have to see them in person to buy their products. They've also set up a Web site (www.tropicalitems.com) and are about to add e-commerce capability because, Rakotonirina explains, "People go to festivals but aren't ready to buy something that day. They said 'Do you have a brochure?' But we didn't have enough money to print a brochure, so we set up a Web site."
Raelisaona, who is an adviser at the Boulder Campus of Front Range Community College when he's not hawking crafts from his native country, maintains the Web site, so the cost is minimal for the fledgling company. Rakotonirina also has a day job in education, as a teacher at Boulder's Community Montessori school.
The products sold by Tropical Items Madagascar are made of raffia, a fiber made from a palm tree that's native to Madagascar. Rakotonirina noticed that products made of raffia available in the United States always had labels saying they were made in China or Indonesia.
"But natural raffia comes from Madagascar. There are so many beautiful bags in Madagascar, but our products were never in the U.S. at all," she says. Instead, the fibers were sent to other countries, which then exported raffia products here.
Importing authentic Madagascan raffia products directly to the United States was made possible after the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) was signed into law by then-President Clinton in 2000. The law opened up trade with sub-Saharan African nations, and Rakotonirina and her husband saw their opportunity to go into business, starting small but with a humanitarian goal in mind.
Rakotonirina came to Boulder in 1995 as a student, and she met her husband at an event at the Madagascan Embassy in Washington, D.C. They started the company because, she says, "We felt the need to help our country. We both were helped by our country, and we wanted to give back."
Before coming to Boulder, Rakotonirina worked in the Madagascan rainforest training women in the villages how to make a sustainable living.
"I taught the women about recycling, and how to take care of the rainforest," she says. She wrote grants for villages to fund fish ponds and livestock and chicken farms. She also helped establish an eco-tourism industry and urged villagers to sell native arts and crafts to tourists.
Madagascar suffers from food shortages because of a cycle of drought and flooding as well as an ongoing violent political controversy. The average GDP per person for the country's African-Asian population of 15.5 million is $800, so even a few dollars goes a long way toward alleviating poverty.
When she returned home for a visit in 2001, she found the programs she had founded in disarray, and poverty again ruling the rainforest economy. She established co-ops in various villages to harvest raffia and weave the items she now imports and sells to Americans.
"Each group has their own objectives," she says, "whether it's education or a village pharmacy so they don't need to walk 14 miles to get what they need."
Five percent of the profits from Tropical Items Madagascar goes back to the village co-ops for health-care needs, and another five percent goes to education. The couple sold $5,000 worth of products last year after launching Tropical Items Madagascar, and so far this year they've already sold $7,000.
Clarissa Montoya, program manager for the YouthWorks program at the Microbusiness Development Center, which provided a small loan to Tropical Items Madagascar to get off the ground, knows Rakotonirina as more than just as a client. "She attends a lot of our monthly events" to learn about business, she says, "but also I know her because I've seen her at the Outdoor Market and bought some things, and so have some other people in our office. For the craftsmanship and what goes into the products, they're extremely cheap prices."
The costs are kept low in part because business is a family affair, with communications helped by the Internet. Rakotonirina sends e-mails requesting products to her sister, a college student in the capitol city of Antananarivo. Her sister travels to their home village and passes the message to their mother, who distributes it to the villagers.
When they first started, the couple piled up the goods from Madagascar in their Boulder home. A few months ago, they had to rent storage space to accommodate the growing inventory. "Our house was stuffed," she says, laughing.
Although the business is growing, Rakotonirina realizes this is no get-rich scheme, and that's fine with her. She didn't start Tropical Items to make a full-time living as an importer, and she wasn't dreaming of quitting her job as a teacher. In fact, she isn't planning on ever giving up her original career.
"Both experiences have been really rewarding to me," she says. "I feel much more positive about my life by doing both."