By purchasing a rug, you could help enrich the life of a person on the other side of the world.

That’s according to Gwen Lavoie-Repeta, the Interim Manager of Ten Thousand Villages on Henderson Highway and Coordinator for the Rug Program for Canada, Ten Thousand Villages.

Ten Thousand Villages is holding a sale from Oct. 7-22, 2016 on their fair trade Oriental rugs, which are made by an artisan group from Pakistan known as Bunyaad.

The rugs will be 10-50 per cent off.

Lavoie-Repeta says these rugs aren’t quintessential rugs you can buy at any store.

“These are really heirloom quality pieces, you can pass them down to your family members” said Lavoie-Repeta. “The impact they have on people’s lives is really far reaching.”

Lavoie-Repeta visited Pakistan a number of years ago and spoke with some of the people who work for Bunyaad.

She says they’re working hard to make a better life for themselves and their families, using the fair wages they make working on the rugs.

“When you have fairly paid adult labour you can send your kids to school and not a lot of parents in that area can do that,” said Lavoie-Repeta. “One of the people I spoke to was a gentleman who said him and his wife were both uneducated but because he was able to work and make money all four of his daughters were able to go to a girl’s school and get educated.”

“They’re not asking for handouts, they want to work and they want to make a good quality product.”

The Bunyaad rug program was started in the late 1960’s by a Pakistani Baptist pastor Chaman, as a way to create and sustain rug knotting jobs in rural villages.

According to Lavoie-Repeta, the pastor served as a representative for the rug makers when Bunyaad first started. She says many of them were not public people and worried buyers would try and bargain their prices down. He ensured they got fair prices based on the labour they put in.

Bunyaad has grown since then and now includes over 850 families through 100 villages in Pakistan.

Lavoie-Repeta says the rugs are made from scratch. The wool comes from sheep and then the fabric is put through a loom by putting it in one side and pulling it out of the other. They then have to be stretched, designed and dyed. It takes a year of saving onion skins to correctly dye two pounds of wool and most Persian rugs have at least 20 colours in them.

It takes approximately six months to make each rug, according to Lavoie-Repeta.

“This is not people off the street doing it in a factory,” she said. “They’re doing it at home, they’re doing it between feeding their kids and harvesting rice, they’re doing it when the light and timing is correct so you can get a better quality product.”

“I liken it to studying for an exam,” she continued. “If you cram it all in the night before you don’t do as well as if you’ve been studying continuously through a period of time.”

There are two Ten Thousand Villages locations in Winnipeg, one on Henderson Highway and the second on Plaza Drive. However, the rugs will only be on sale at the Plaza location.

If you want to find out more about the rugs you can attend an information session on Oct. 6, at the Plaza location. Lavoie-Repeta says a limited amount of seats will be available so call 204-261-0566 to book a spot.

For more information on the rugs or the sale, visit rugs.tenthousandvillages.com.

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